Contrarian musings on Foley
No one suggests that the Speaker's office, the Page Board or anyone else had the slightest knowledge of the salacious instant messages that precipitated Foley's resignation. Certainly a few puffs of smoke from Foley wafted into the Speaker's office, but they seem to have been pretty thin on specifics and spanned several years. Is it difficult at all to believe that Foley went to great lengths to keep the really mortifying and shameful things he was doing a secret from the people who were in a position to stop him? Of course he did. It is human nature and, more particularly, the nature of someone in Foley's position and mental state, to do so. You can be sure he would never have sent those IMs if he understood that they could be logged and transcribed. He seems to have made some effort to stay on the right side of some laws: if you read the ABC News IM transcripts, there is one where a kid says his birthday is in February and another where a kid says something like "not until February" about a meeting in person. My hunch is that it was the same kid. I'm not a mental health professional, but I don't think someone attracted to 16-, 17- and 18-year-olds is a pedophilia in the same clinical sense we most often think of. There is a difference between interest in prepubescent children and interest in sexually-mature (in the biological sense) teens who for most of human history were getting married at those ages. My guess is that a rational person who liked 17-year-olds would opt for 18-year-olds instead if it meant not going to jail. Hence the term "jailbait", which was not invented for the benefit of true pedophiles. But I digress.
Pundits have written very little about what concrete steps Speaker Hastert and other congressional leaders should have taken in response to what they did know about Foley. I think this is because they can't come up with a set of steps based on what the leadership knew that would have prevented Foley from doing what he did, communicate privately via instant messages. And I'd say that what they knew about Foley was about what the average high school principal knows about the cryptically over-familiar teacher or coach that every high school has. (The analogy is apt, I think, because in most iterations of our universe "high school principal" would be the highest office Dennis Hastert could hope to attain. Many Americans are just now learning the Speaker's name and belatedly recognizing that he is a mediocrity. A few have known from the start that he is not only a mediocrity, but one installed in an office he never would have attained on his own.)
The fact that children were involved clouds matters with the usual rhetoric about corrupting innocents, breaches of trust, etc. If you take children out of the equation you are left with private behavior of an autonomous elected member of Congress. Whether criminal or not, it's unclear why his party leadership should be charged with responsibility for that. Should we be figuring out what the Democrats knew about Patrick Kennedy's substance abuse problems?
Mark Foley is destined to fade into footnotehood like Gary Condit and many others I've already forgotten. Unless it's shown House leaders knew or should have known something no one has yet claimed, the whole episode ought to fade with him. But there are few signs that it will.
posted at 12:15 AM
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