Slog News & Arts

Line Out

Music & Nightlife

« Charo, Charo, Charo! | Way to Poster »

Monday, October 23, 2006

“You could always stay at my place. I’m always here, I’m always lonely, and I’m always up for oral sex.”

posted by on October 23 at 12:31 PM

So said Mark Foley in response to a former congressional page’s e-mail asking about D.C. hotels.

And it wasn’t just former pages:

At times, Foley seemed to speak suggestively to boys before they left the program. A female former page remembers becoming uneasy one day in 2000 as she watched him talk “a little too much” on the House floor to a boy she knew. Right afterward, she asked what Foley had said. The boy, she recalled, told her Foley had admired the page’s “very big hands” and boasted about his “glorious” home in Florida. The boy added: “Eighteen. Eighteen’s that magic number.” The girl was appalled at what seemed to her to be a come-on that the boy did not fully understand.

After their graduation a few months later, she said, another male page told her that he and Foley were exchanging e-mails and that the congressman had asked him to mail a picture of himself to Foley’s Washington house.

The Republican page from 2002, who exchanged instant messages with Foley for two months, said the first one arrived just before the start of his senior year of high school. He found the message when he logged on to his family’s computer after dinner one night. At first, he assumed it was a prank by another page pretending to be the congressman. “It was a friendly conversation that got strange,” said the young man, now 21. In one, Foley asked whether his roommates had worn “no boxers or briefs to bed.”

Party of values, indeed.

RSS icon Comments

1

But don't you understand? He was a drunk. And was molested by a priest. And those teenagers were all preying on him.

IT'S NOT HIS FAULT!!! HE'S A REPUBLICAN!!!

Posted by Republicans are not Responsible | October 23, 2006 12:42 PM
2

Erica,

Come’on. Republicans do so have values:

Greed
Oil
Pollution

Plus hatred, fear and hypocrisy!

After all, they are the Party of True Christian Values®.

Posted by Andrew | October 23, 2006 1:01 PM
3

when I read the headline with ECB's name under it I got pretty excited.

Posted by Frank | October 23, 2006 2:06 PM
4

Because both parties have been peppered with sleazy politicians over the years (including former Presidents), I don't think that either party can claim to be the party of values.

Posted by Proud Gay Republican | October 23, 2006 2:47 PM
5

Dear Proud Gay Republican --

You're mistaken. And self-hating. Don't forget: Your party has been trying to win elections by promising to amend the Constitution to make you a second class citizen.

Night and day. If you want to say you're tax break is worth losing your equality before the law, have fun.

But don't pretend there is no difference.

Proud Gay Democrat (aka Jonathan)

Posted by Jonathan | October 23, 2006 2:50 PM
6

Oh, would that the Republican Party were the party of Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan! Alas, however: it belongs to Exxon and James Dobson. And that's what you get when you hitch your wagon their theirs: bigotry, fear, hatred and corruption.

Care to start your own 3rd party, PGR?

Posted by david | October 23, 2006 3:16 PM
7

Remember, boys & girls, the only useful reason we're into the 4th week of the Foley bottom-feeding frenzy is that the Plame-lib-media circle-wank frenzy died an ignominious death, and the lib media have all that vapid empty space to fill:

http://townhall.com/columnists/JonahGoldberg/2006/09/06/chum_in_the_water_sets_off_media_feeding_frenzy

Now is the time to ask: What do John Mark Karr and Joseph Wilson have in common? Wilson is no more a would-be pedophile than Karr is a former diplomat. But they are both attention-seeking liars who deliberately helped launch criminal investigations that should never have gone as far as they did.

Moreover, they launched media feeding frenzies that wasted everybody’s time. It’s this second point that interests me more than the first. Ever since it was reported that Karr wasn’t the right guy, the media — cable news networks in particular — have been taking a beating by the professional fingerwaggers. The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz declared that the Karr episode “instantly goes down with the greatest media embarrassments in modern history.”

In fairness, the fingerwaggers have a point. A woman who flew on the same plane as Karr, for example, was interviewed as if she had survived the downing of the Titanic. The Karr family baby sitter was filmed in shadows for her interview, as if she were in witness protection for ratting out Vincent “the Chin” Gigante.

“The problem is that the New York Times devoted in one of their articles ... 13 reporters to John Mark Karr. They don’t have 13 reporters in Iraq. That’s the embarrassment,” exclaimed media writer Neal Gabler on Fox News.

But when it comes to the Joseph Wilson story, the wagging fingers shudder to a full stop. Wilson’s allegations were all outright lies or, at best, deceitful insinuations. At least when Karr lied, he put the blame on himself. In Wilson’s telling, he could do no wrong even as he was a one-man sprinkler system of false accusations — accusations that launched an absurd investigation, cost the vice president’s chief of staff his job, put a journalist in jail and threatened to do likewise to many more, and hurt America’s image around the globe.

As it turned out, Wilson’s accusation that President Bush lied in his State of the Union speech about Iraq seeking “yellowcake uranium” was debunked by the Senate Intelligence Committee. As was Wilson’s repeated denial that his wife didn’t help him get the Niger assignment. His suggestion that Dick Cheney sent him to Africa and that Cheney deliberately ignored Wilson’s shoddy report was pure Wilsonian conjecture. And, of course, his self-lionizing speculation that the White House launched a vengeful campaign against his wife never had any basis in fact. Indeed, there’s good reason to believe Wilson himself leaked the information that Plame was an undercover agent.

But that didn’t stop the press from going hog wild. The New York Times led the clamor for an independent prosecutor (who, once appointed, put the Times’ own reporter, Judith Miller, in jail). And unlike the journalists who insisted that John Mark Karr was innocent until proven guilty, the Times’ mob of liberal pundits worked from the opposite assumption when it came to Karl Rove et al.

Paul Krugman suggested Rove should receive his medal for ruining America from a jail cell. Maureen Dowd insisted, “The issue is the administration’s credibility, not Joe Wilson’s.” And, of course, the left-wing blogs spewed bile about “treason” all day long.

Now, I’m not saying the press shouldn’t have investigated Wilson’s allegations. Even if we now know he isn’t a serious man, the charges surely were. But I don’t think it was wrong for the press to cover Karr exhaustively (as opposed to excessively) either. The press has been in the true-crime business for centuries. The JonBenet Ramsey murder was a huge story, and a man with a reported record of interest in underage girls confessed to the crime in Bangkok — a Mecca for perverts The Karr story was unfolding in real time, and the news is supposed to cover, you know, news. Most important, unlike Wilson, Karr was in a position to know the truth of the matter.

Kurtz wrote this about the Karr story: “Facts don’t matter in frenzies; what matters is camera-ready speculation, where opposing lawyers and ex-prosecutors can argue on one talk show after another.” Just replace lawyers and ex-prosecutors with spinners, pundits and consultants, and the same holds true.

I don’t know if the Wilson fraud will instantly go down with the greatest media embarrassments in modern history. However, the press doesn’t seem to mind beating itself up when it overindulges the public’s passions. But when its own self-indulgence is the issue, there’s never any need to feel embarrassed.

Indeed, there’s no need to say anything at all.

Posted by self-hating latent dormant breeder | October 23, 2006 3:48 PM
8

Self-hating Latent Dormant Breeder,

Actually, there is something to say:

You're insane.

Fuck off.

Posted by Andrew | October 23, 2006 4:16 PM
9

Gotta love those Republican apologists. Treason, murder, pedophilia. They'll line up and defend anything.

Posted by Aexia | October 23, 2006 4:27 PM
10

Note how the last two posts fail to debate the issue. Without ideas of their own, not to mention curiosity about other ideas, they can only recycle tired insults to try to make themselves feel better.

Actully, this has been the case for decades:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyOu7L92Vc8

Posted by Proud Gay Republican | October 23, 2006 4:41 PM
11

But Bush DID lie about the yellow-cake uranium ore in his speech. He DID know that there was no merit to the story, that the documents were forged, Saddam wasn't interested in Niger's yellow-cake uranium at all, nor was Niger ever interested in selling it to him. Bush KNEW that the evidence he was presenting was false and sexed-up. This isn't Wilson's side of the story; it's EVERYBODY's side of the story.

This kind of pathetic "link him to the sex pervert" story is even lower than usual for Jonah Goldberg or the other liars that Karl Rove is just starting to unleash. It's not surprising that Goldberg is immersed in filth, or that he is a blatant liar. That's his job.

Posted by Fnarf | October 23, 2006 5:59 PM
12

Okay, Frank's comment made me laugh.

Posted by Gomez | October 24, 2006 8:30 AM
13

"But Bush DID lie about the yellow-cake uranium ore in his speech. He DID know that there was no merit to the story ..." Whoa! Who liberated the confection called 'snarf' from the Betty Ford Clinic, way too soon & against medical advice?

Bush's 16 words, disavowed by Bush, are still approved by British intelligence (to whom Bush referred) and by Andrew Sullivan who recently wrote that Saddam indeed was trying to buy uranium "in Africa." Sullivan says that British intel says it was Congo, not Niger, the object of Joe Wilson's obsession and the locus of his blind ambition.

And speaking of fucking fools, who let Andrew back into the 'hood?

Posted by mistress valerie plame | October 24, 2006 9:32 AM

Comments Closed

In order to combat spam, we are no longer accepting comments on this post (or any post more than 14 days old).