Foley, Gays and the Religious Right: Is This the Nail in the GOP Coffin?
By Evan Derkacz, AlterNet
Posted on October 3, 2006, Printed on October 3, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/42470/
If there's any question as to why former Rep. Mark Foley was able to
continue his harassment of teenage congressional pages, look no further than
the spin of Bush spokesman Tony Snow: "Look, I hate to tell you but it's not
always pretty up there on Capitol Hill, and there have been other scandals,
as you know, that have been more than simply, uh, uh, uh, naughty emails."
Those "naughty emails" (and instant messages) included "I would drive a few
miles for a hot stud like you," requests for photos, unambiguous advances
("we eat .we drink . who knows . hang out . late into the night"), and
exchanges like this one (Maf54 is Foley):
Maf54: What ya wearing?
Teen: T-shirt and shorts.
Maf54: Love to slip them off of you.
As egregious as his behavior appears to be, the writer of the above messages
isn't the whole story -- he's merely a catalyst. Foley, who resigned on
Friday, has checked into alcohol rehab and stated that he was "deeply
sorry." He faces an FBI investigation to perhaps, ironically, be convicted
under some of the laws he helped to pass.
But the bigger, more institutional question remains: What did the GOP
leadership know, and when did they know it? Evidence suggests that Speaker
Dennis Hastert and Majority Leader Jim Boehner both knew that there were
issues -- though neither, of course, cops to awareness of anything
approaching the text above. In fact, evidence suggests that Foley's behavior
was well known in GOP circles for years, with former page Matthew Loraditch
telling ABC News that pages were warned to "watch out for Foley" as early as
2001.
After initially stating simply that he knew nothing until it was reported in
the press, House Speaker Dennis Hastert eventually owned up to the fact that
his office was notified of "over-friendly" communications between Foley and
a page many months earlier. His office was also notified that the page's
family "wanted the contact to stop."
This was roughly a year ago, in the fall of 2005, yet the speaker did
nothing. In fact, though he admits he was personally told about this by Rep.
Rodney Alexander, he also claims to not "explicitly recall" the
conversation. Alexander is the congressman of the page on the other end of
Foley's advances.
According to an AP report, "Rep. Thomas Reynolds, who heads the House
Republican election effort, said Saturday he told Hastert months ago about
concerns that a fellow Republican lawmaker, Rep. Mark Foley, had sent
inappropriate messages to a teenage boy."
Then there's Majority Leader Jim Boehner's conversation with Hastert, during
which, Boehner says, Hastert claimed that "we're taking care of it." That
was this spring. Since then, Hastert has allowed Foley several months of
"over-friendly" "contact" with a teenager. In a CNN interview, conservative
Bay Buchanan noted that the earliest emails "had predator stamped all over
it." And that: "No one in the country can suggest otherwise."
Hastert has consistently followed the Katrina approach to leadership: ignore
the warning signs, keep cronies in power and undercut investigations of
wrongdoing. Hastert himself is the beneficiary of cronyism -- he was
shepherded into the position of leadership by Tom DeLay after Newt
Gingrich's resignation and the resignation of the man who was poised to
replace Gingrich. A third-stringer, as it were.
According to the Washington Post's Jonathan Weisman, Hastert's office was
well known to take a "laissez-faire" approach to ethics issues. Weisman
quotes a Republican source, who adds: "They don't respond when things are
bending, but they get very excited when they break."
Sure, this could easily describe Hastert's actions with regard to the Foley
case. But the story actually appeared earlier this year when Hastert came
under fire for his softball treatment of bribery and corruption allegations
against Republican Bob Ney. Ney, who's now in prison, was officially
subpoenaed for documents in the Abramoff scandal months before being asked
"to temporarily relinquish the chairmanship of the House Administration
Committee." Still, upon learning of "over-friendly" communications with a
teenage boy, Hastert didn't even ask Foley to quit his post as chairman of
the Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus.
Prior to that, Hastert had bent over backwards to protect Tom DeLay and
others, going so far as to replace the Republican head of the ethics
committee when he attempted to actually enforce ethics rules. Then, when
DeLay faced a determined Texas prosecutor in Ronnie Earle, Hastert went and
changed the House ethics rules altogether. The changes were eventually
repealed as they allowed too much leeway for even this House to deal with.
It's clear that this isn't a problem that can be taken care of by ousting
one or two bad apples. It's institutional. Insider journal Roll Call writes:
As of Saturday evening, nearly a dozen House GOP lawmakers and staffers
have acknowledged that they knew of the initial batch of nonsexually
explicit messages from Foley to a 16-year-old former House page, some of
them for a year or more. These include Hastert; Majority Leader John Boehner
(Ohio); National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Tom Reynolds
(N.Y.); Reps. Rodney Alexander (La.) and John Shimkus (Ill.); Mike Stokke,
the speaker's deputy chief of staff; Ted Van Der Meid, Hastert's counsel;
Paula Nowakowski, Boehner's chief of staff; Jeff Trandahl, the former clerk
of the House; and another Hastert aide and Alexander's chief of staff,
according to public statements and GOP insiders.
Not one of the above ever told a Democrat about Foley's actions, including
the only Democrat on the House page board, Rep. Dale Kildee. On Monday, the
political maneuvering became even more vivid, with Hastert telling CNN that
he was probably informed by Reynolds "in the context of maybe a half a dozen
or a dozen other things ... that might have affected campaigns."
Winning campaigns is, of course, a necessity in this line of work. The
problem has been that Hastert and much of the GOP-led congress has let the
desire to win overshadow the best interests of the American people. It was
the case with DeLay, Ney and now Foley, whose actions could have been
hindered much earlier, were a better balance struck between elections and
ethics.
Up to this point, the "coverup" had been a mostly passive one, sins of
omission, shades of plausible denial and Reaganesque "I can't recall's." But
then, as the first emails began to emerge, Tom Reynolds, whose job is to get
Republicans elected, lent his chief of staff, Kirk Fordham, to Foley. Or
"lent him back" to Foley, I should say, as Fordham was Foley's chief of
staff for a decade. Fordham promptly attempted to bury his former boss's
behavior by making a deal with ABC's Brian Ross, who broke the story:
The correspondent [Ross], who had dozens of instant messages that Foley
sent to teenage House pages, had asked to interview the Florida Republican.
Foley's former chief of staff said the congressman was quitting and that
Ross could have that information exclusively if he agreed not to publish the
raw, sexually explicit messages.
In effect, an operative from the office that promotes the election of
Republicans attempted to suppress the most damaging elements of the emerging
scandal. With just weeks to go before the midterm election, analysts are
predicting that the fallout could be huge. The pundit zeitgeist seems to be
favoring the natural disaster theme: "8 or 9 on the Richter scale,"
according to Hotline's Chuck Todd and John Mercurio.
But there's another dimension to this scandal which could prove even more
damaging than the specifics of the Foley case and its coverup: the issue of
gays in the Republican Party. Howie Klein expands on what Josh Bearman
refers to as "karmic irony for Republicans." Meaning: the party of
gay-haters being packed with gay politicians.
Klein notes that Republicans David Dreier, Jim Kolbe and Michael Huffington,
are well known to be gay, in addition to a number Bush's high level staff
who are thought to be as well.
Kenyn Cureton, vice president of the 16 million strong Southern Baptist
Convention, noted recently that "Conservative Christians are somewhat
disenchanted with Republicans," and that "It has not escaped our notice that
they waited until just a few months from the November elections to address
our agenda." The No. 1 priority on that agenda, ahead of abortion even, is
gays.
In the Wall Street Journal last week, former House Majority Leader *****
Armey called the Christian right "thugs" and "nasty bullies," while the week
before that, Focus on the Family founder James Dobson expressed his
frustration at the Republican party, saying that he's "flat-out ... ticked."
As for Bush himself, in just the past two years, he's gone from 78 percent
support from white evangelicals to a bruising 42 percent disapproval rating.
Into this rift lands the Foley wedge. That wedge is widened by the fact that
many in the GOP knew Foley was gay but didn't say anything for months or
years -- a tacit acceptance, even for political reasons, of gays in the
party.
In a post entitled "Pro-Homosexual Political Correctness Sowed Seeds for
Foley Scandal," power pastor Tony Perkins writes: "Democrats seeking to
exploit the resignation of Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., are right to criticize
the slow response of Republican congressional leaders to his communications
with male pages." Of course, he goes on to cite faulty data connecting gays
to abuse, but the point remains, the rift is opening and the GOP is in
danger of losing its lifeblood: conservative Christian votes.
On Monday's Good Morning America, George Stephanopoulos stuck with the
natural disaster theme to paint a grim picture:
Right now it's a category 3 hurricane and it's picking up steam.
Republicans all across the country are getting questions about it. But
here's the key question: Did any Republican leaders know about those x-rated
emails? If they did, it's game over. The leadership will have to resign. It
will cost Republicans control of Congress. As one top GOP aide told me this
morning, "the place will burn down."
Evan Derkacz is AlterNet's associate editor and writer of PEEK, the blog of
blogs.
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
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