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Mark Foley Is a Disgrace John LeBoutillier The ongoing revelations that Florida Rep. Mark Foley — a member of the House GOP leadership and co-chairman of the House Task Force on Missing and Abused Children — engaged in an e-mail campaign to seduce underage boy pages is one of the most disgusting and disgraceful episodes in the history of our Congress.
Even worse is the unfolding news over the weekend that more than a year ago the speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, and the incoming majority leader, John Boehner and the chairman of the GOP Congressional Campaign Committee, Tom Reynolds, all knew of Foley's e-mails and pedophilia.
If we ever wondered how low our government had gone, wonder no more. The Republicans have sunk lower that I ever thought possible.
Sure, one sick and demented member of the House does not and should not implicate the entire membership; but the fact that the top leaders of the party knew about it and did nothing about it shows how pathetic and disgusting they have become.
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Clearly Hastert, Boehner, Reynolds, and others cared more about keeping their majority than they did about the shocking and demented criminality they protected.
Just think of the damage to the boy or boys who were preyed upon by Foley: the pain, the suffering, and the permanent lifetime damage such a thing is certain to cause.
All you have to do is read these e-mails and you want to throw up.
What a disgrace this burgeoning scandal is. It is — in a way — much worse than the check bouncing scandal of the early 1990s. We Republicans are supposed to stand for a higher moral standard than the more libertine democrats and their tolerance of adultery, cheating, and "anything goes."
But Hastert and company were clearly so afraid of losing a supposedly safe seat that they tolerated Foley's behavior.
What hypocrisy! The party that is against gay marriage tolerates a gay member of Congress who chases underage boys.
Now this scandal is only just beginning.
More victims will come forward and the media will show them to us; more revelations about how much the GOP leadership knew — and when they knew it; calls by Democrats for a full-out, independent investigation — not the sham that the House Ethics Committee has become. Make no mistake about this: This pedophilia scandal has the potential to be a huge issue in this November's elections. How? By going right to the heart of the Republican Party base: Christians and those who worry that our nation is deteriorating morally. How can these "values" voters possibly support the GOP when such a cover-up has been exposed?
Coupled with the mess in Iraq and daily revelations of a cover-up of the truth about Iraq by the Bush White House, the mood in November could again be cynical and sour for Republicans.
Lately things had been going the Republicans' way: Gas prices have come down, the stock market has soared, and the war on terror had replaced the carnage in Iraq as the main TV story.
But the pendulum is again swinging back in an anti-Republican direction. The question is — with five weeks remaining before these crucial mid-term elections — will it yet again reverse direction and favor the GOP?
Whatever happens, this scandal is disgusting and disgraceful.
It makes me ashamed to be a Republican.
Editor's note:
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