By now, you probably know about Rep Mark Foley stepping down after being revealed to be a sexual predator. Foley wasn’t just caught sending creepy emails to underage boy(s), but some sexually explicit IMs. You’ve also probably heard last night’s revelation that some members of the House leadership were aware of the emails (at least) for almost a year and did nothing about it. But unless you’ve been glued to your computer all day, you may have missed all of the twists and turns the scandal has taken today. It’s every man for himself as the GOP leadership is pointing fingers at each other. Josh Marshall, who’s been leading on this story, sums up things well :
I’ve been at this blog racket for almost six years. And usually you’ve got to really pore over the details to find the inconsistencies and contradictions. So I’m not sure I’ve ever seen this big a train wreck where leaders at the highest eschelons of power repeatedly fib, contradict each other and change their stories so quickly. It’s mendacity as performance art; you can see the story unravel in real time.
. . .
These fibs and turnabouts amount to a whole far larger than the sum of its parts. Even the most cynical politicians carefully vet their stories to assure that they cannot easily be contradicted by other credible personages. When you see Majority Leaders and Speakers and Committee chairs calling each other liars in public you know that the underlying story is very bad, that the system of coordination and hierarchy has broken down and that each player believes he’s in a fight for his life.
As well they should be. Their careers are probably over at a minimum. There may be legal liability as well. And depending on how deep the cover-up goes, this could very well bring down the entire GOP with them. People who vote on “moral values” probably aren’t going to like the fact that their party leaders have been covering up for a guy who asked an underage boy to “get a ruler and measure it for me”. This is a milder form of the same sickness that brought down Cardinal Bernard Law and it’ll bring down any Republican who sat on this information as well. As it should.