Government by lechers and creeps

So I have been out of town and totally cut off from the news since Friday morning. I got back yesterday, flipped on CNN. Imagine my shock to see that, since Friday, it has been all Mark Foley all of the time. Apparently, Rep. Foley (R-FL) carried on inappropriate and sexually oriented email and IM sessions with more than one underage male House page. Foley, upon learning that the emails were going to go public, promptly resigned and, as of this morning, checked into an alcoholic treatment program. The great irony here is that Foley had been known as a champion for children from sexual predators (project much?).

But as we all know, the crime may not get you but the cover up will. It is now known that the House Republican leadership knew of these emails for as long as a year ago and chose to merely reprimand Rep. Foley and request that not contact the young men again. Allegations that the leadership helped cover up a potential felony has Denny Hastert, House Speaker, spinning furiously.

In his letter to Gonzales, Hastert described two sets of electronic messages from Foley to male congressional pages. The first were to the 16-year-old former page and contained no sexually explicit language and have been characterized as “overly friendly.”

The second e-mails, Hastert wrote, were sexually explicit instant messages to other pages that Hastert said he was unaware of until they were disclosed in media reports in recent days.
“These sexually explicit communications warrant a criminal referral,” Hastert said in the letter. “In so doing, it is important to know who may have had the communications and why they were not given to prosecutors before now.”

[Snip]

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., also called for a criminal probe to give the public “a full accounting for this despicable episode.”

“The allegations against Congressman Foley are repugnant, but equally as bad is the possibility that Republican leaders in the House of Representatives knew there was a problem and ignored it to preserve a Congressional seat this election year,” Reid said.

“Under laws that Congressman Foley helped write, soliciting sex from a minor online is a federal crime . . . The attorney general should open a full-scale investigation immediately,” Reid said in a statement.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Sunday that the FBI is “rightly” investigating the Foley matter, which she has charged that House Republican leaders ignored for nearly a year.

“Congress must not pass the buck on investigating this cover-up,” Pelosi wrote.

So – is the Republican leadership craven enough to chance on some kids being molested for the sake of preserving their majority in the House? Again, I am playing catch up on this story so I do not know all of the facts. But it sure looks like they know they had a problem in Foley and chose to more or less ignore it for political expediency. The Republican leadership appears to have made the choice that it is OK to fuck kids as long as you can get re-elected. The whole thing smacks of the Catholic clergy molestation scandals in which powerful interests protected pedophile priests at the expense of the most vulnerable among us.

If the allegations of a cover up are true, then we are ruled by some very sick, very twisted people who can not be trusted to protect your kids, much less look after the broader interests of the American people. This is simply unconscionable; these bastards must go.