Speaker Hastert revisited
I realize that my post last night on Rep. Foley and Speaker Hastert was a bit unfair to Hastert. If one accepts his timeline, as I do unless it's proven to be incorrect, then Hastert did not hear anything about Foley emails in the fall of 2005 when Rep. Alexander told a member of Hastert's staff about one of them. In the spring of 2006, Hastert heard that an issue had come up with respect to emails and that it had been investigated and resolved by the Clerk of the House and Rep. Shimkus. Thus, contrary to what I suggested yesterday, in Hastert's account he never received a report of an uninvestigated suggestion of improper emailing by Foley. Pre-investigation, he didn't receive any report about emails, only his staff did. Post-investigation, the matter had already been "handled."
In my opinion, Hastert still bears responsibility for what I consider inadequate efforts by his staff in response to the report from Rep. Alexander. At a minimum, his staff should have reported the problem to Hastert, in which case, I hope, he would have seen to it that the matter was not brushed aside as easily as it was. For example, someone might have reviewed the email (the excuse that the parents of the page didn't want the email reviewed for privacy reasons doesn't hold up too well -- the name of the page could have been redacted). Or someone might have tried to determine whether this was part of a pattern of conduct, as it almost inevitably is.
One can also argue that, upon hearing about the matter from Rep. Reynolds in 2006, Hastert should have ascertained just how the matter had been investigated and resolved. Such an inquiry would, I think, have shown that it had been handled very superficially and without the seriousness it deserved. However, Hastert probably had a right to rely on assurances that the matter had properly been handled.
The upshot of all of this is that, assuming that Hastert's account is truthful, the case for Hastert's resignation is even weaker than I had thought.
UPDATE: Tony Blankley is still insisting that Speaker Hastert should resign. The linchpin of Blankley's argument is the claim that "when the speaker was told that Mark Foley had sent that first e-mail -- the overly friendly one that we all saw last Friday -- he had to be either morally obtuse or on notice of the problem." Again, though, in Hastert's account (actually Rep. Reynolds' account which Hastert accepts), he was told about the e-mail only in the context of it being a matter that already had been investigated by the Clerk of the House and Rep. Shimkus. In a sense, then, he was on notice of what had been deemed a non-problem.
Certainly, it would have been better for Hastert to have found out more about the investigation and the underlying issue. However, I'm hard-pressed to call it negligent for Hastert not to have reopened a matter he reasonably could believe properly had been resolved. And even if one does perceive some amount of negligence here, or in what I think was poor work by Hastert's staff earlier on, I don't see how it rises to the level of a "firing" offense.
Blankley says he has known Hastert for almost two decades and considers him "an exceedingly decent man and a hard worker for conservative Republican values and politics." So why throw him under the bus on these facts?
JOHN adds: What strikes me about this story is how little anyone cares about Mark Foley. He is a disgusting slimeball, yet the Democrats have yet to direct a harsh word in his direction, as far as I can tell. The only interest the story holds for the Democrats/press is their effort to destroy Speaker Hastert, who, whatever his pork-related sins might be, has never porked an intern, or attempted to. The Democrats/press don't have anything in particular against Hastert, either. Unlike, say, Tom DeLay, he has been neither especially effective nor especially partisan as Speaker. But the Democrats/press don't care; if they can get him, they will.
One of the reasons why the Democrats/press prefer not to talk about Foley, I think, it that they are uncomfortable about shining a light on an obvious and highly troubling aspect of gay culture: the fact that boys are viewed as appropriate objects of desire by many homosexuals. Thus, when Democrat Gerry Studds didn't just fantasize about having sex with an underage page, like Foley, but actually did it on the Capitol grounds, he angrily rejected any suggestion that he had done anything improper. In this, he was supported by most homosexuals and a good number of heterosexuals, including columnist Colman McCarthy, who denounced criticism of Stubbs as a "witch hunt." (Has McCarthy weighed in on Foley? I don't know.) And, of course, his view that gay sex with a minor is just fine was supported by his Massachusetts constituents, who continued to re-elect him.
But the main reason for the Democrat/press focus on Hastert, to the virtual exclusion of Foley, is that they are trying to destroy Hastert so as to seize control of the House next month. Certainly, when Democrat Stubbs was caught seducing male interns, no one turned the story into an attack on Tip O'Neill. What we are seeing here is yet another instance of the politics of bad faith, which is pretty much the only kind of politics that now exist on the left.
