The Foley Finger-Pointing

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 10, 2006 9:02 AM

Mark Foley is no longer the issue.

Sex is.

Or politicians' attitudes toward sexual permissiveness, morality and hypocrisy in society. Or something like that.

It was inevitable that the seamy saga of a congressman sexually stalking a bunch of teenagers would broaden into a debate about where we draw the lines about this kind of conduct. After all, no one wants to defend what the former Florida congressman did, and arguing that Denny Hastert & Co. did all that they could do is a steep uphill climb. Even the current GOP talking point, that Democrats somehow had a role in pushing this story into public view--a theory without a shred of evidence, I might add--has grown rather tiresome.

But conservatives have finally come up with an argument that might gain some traction: that Democrats who defended a certain president who had a dalliance with a certain intern can't really be outraged about what Foley did, and are just manufacturing outrage for partisan consumption.

The counterargument: Republicans would be tarring Democrats as the party of gay pedophiles if Foley had sported a D after his name.

Keep in mind that Mark Foley was asking a 16-year-old kid for a picture, and that Bill Clinton's White House staff didn't know what he had been doing--and therefore couldn't cover up for him--whereas the House Republican leadership clearly got a number of warnings. Still, with Republicans taking a drubbing on the Foley mess in a new round of polls--Newsweek even has the Democrats getting higher marks on moral issues--this effort to paint the other side as hypocritical is only going to intensify.

National Review's Rich Lowry says Democrats don't make convincing sexual conservatives:

"If anything good can come from the mess regarding disgraced Florida Congressman Mark Foley, it is a new consensus against the sexualization of teenagers. Democrats and Republicans alike professed to be appalled by Foley's efforts via the Internet to help male teens 'explore their sexuality.' Alas, this consensus is something of a mirage, since much of the Democratic outrage over Foley is opportunistic. The Foley flap is to sexual politics what the Dubai ports deal was to the national-security debate -- a rare chance for Democrats to play to the natural conservatism of the country by attempting to get to the Republicans' right on a hot-button issue.

"On the ports deal, the Democrats briefly were the party so robustly committed to national security that diplomatic considerations and openness to foreigners didn't matter. On Foley, the Democrats, for now, are as zealously against teen sexual exploration as the most uptight member of the Christian right, with an undercurrent of disgust at homosexual sex thrown in.

"The temporary turn on the Dubai ports deal didn't last, as Democrats lapsed into their support for winking at illegal immigration and for diplomatic summits to address all foreign-policy problems, thus turning off any of the nativist-leaning hawks who might have been attracted to their posture on the ports deal. On Foley, their newfound sexual conservatism will be similarly difficult to maintain. Why would anyone who's repelled by the Foley scandal turn around and vote for the party that is usually proud to represent sexual nonjudgmentalism? . . .

"Democrats might benefit politically from the odor of incompetence that attaches to the Republican leadership in how they've handled the Foley mess, but on a moral level, there's been no excuse-making of the sort that Democrats resorted to when President Clinton had his Monica dalliance."

Lowry's NR colleague, Jonah Goldberg says the libs have gone too far:

"Now, let me be clear. I carry no water for the House GOP. Less than a month ago, I wrote that I thought it would probably be a good thing if the Republicans lost the House. So I'm hardly inclined to rally to their flag because of their handling of this Foley mess. But let me make a prediction: Despite the Crucible-like moral panic sweeping Washington right now, this will backfire on Democrats, liberals, and the gay Left.

"Self-described progressives are great at whipping up a moral frenzy when it serves their purposes, and are hilariously indignant when Moral Majority types return fire in kind. Remember the national bout of St. Vitus' dance over sexual harassment in the late 1980s and early 1990s? Liberals made sexual harassment their signature issue, rending their clothes and gnashing their teeth over Sens. John Tower and Bob Packwood and Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, among others. The puritanical zeal of these inquisitions cannot be exaggerated. And then came Bill Clinton, who was, by any fair measure, a worse womanizer than Thomas or the rest of them. The Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit led, inexorably, to revelations of alleged rape and scandalous behavior with an intern. Forced to choose between power and principle, liberals and feminists held an impromptu fire sale on principles."

But if the gay Left is hypocritical, what about the gay Right, where lawmakers and staffers mouth the rhetoric but won't even acknowledge their sexuality? Foley once complained loudly when a newspaper reported that he was gay.

At the New Republic, Jonathan Chait sniffs the scent of hypocrisy from a prominent editorial page:

"The other day I was reading a lead editorial in The Wall Street Journal complaining that the Mark Foley scandal had drowned out more substantive matters. 'The war on terror, and Iraq, really are the largest issues in front of the American people,' urged the editors. 'We need a clear reading on that in November, not on the personal ruin of Mark Foley.'

"Upon reading this, my first reaction was to laugh hysterically while pounding the table with my fist. In case you don't get the joke, the Journal editorial page devoted most of the 1990s to fervently hyping up sundry Bill Clinton scandals, from a murky land deal in Arkansas to the firing of the staff of the all-important White House travel office to, of course, Clinton's tawdry sex life. The Journal published so many editorials on these personal scandals that it compiled them into a book, Whitewater, that reached a staggering 541 pages. Then it proceeded to write enough subsequent scandal editorials to fill up five more books of comparable length. Now, though, it wants an earnest forum on the issues. To which I say: ha, ha, ha.

"After having a good laugh, though, I had to say--flaming hypocrisy aside--the Journal has a bit of a point. The Foley scandal is obscene, and it does involve public officials, but I wouldn't call it terribly important.

"No, I don't think it's OK for members of Congress to prey upon teenagers. And yes, I find it disturbing that the Republican leadership apparently ignored warning signals in order to avoid a potential scandal. But, really, how high does management of the congressional page program rank on the list of issues before the public? Not very high, I submit. The number of people affected is tiny. The main perpetrator, Foley, has already been drummed out of public life."

A brief timeout here for the latest tsunami of polls.

"Americans say that Republican Congressional leaders put their political interests ahead of protecting the safety of teenage pages, and that House leaders knew of former Representative Mark Foley's sexually charged messages to pages well before he was forced to quit Congress, according to the latest New York Times /CBS News poll.

"The poll, completed before North Korea announced that it had detonated a nuclear test explosion, also found that the war in Iraq continues to take a toll on President Bush and the Republican Party, and that the White House is having difficulty retaining its edge in handling terrorism.

"The number of Americans who approve of Mr. Bush's handling of the campaign terrorism dropped to 46 percent from 54 percent over the past two weeks, suggesting that the president had failed to gain any political lift from an orchestrated set of ceremonies marking the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

"In addition, the poll shows that Americans are now evenly divided over which party they think can better handle terrorism, marking the first time that Democrats have matched Republicans on national security, despite a concerted White House effort to seize the advantage on the issue this month."

Here's the real eye-opener:

"Seventy-nine percent of respondents said House Republican leaders were more concerned about their political standing than about the safety of teenage Congressional pages. About half of respondents said that the House Republican leadership had handled the Foley case improperly, compared with 27 percent who said they approved of how it was handled; 46 percent of respondents said Speaker J. Dennis Hastert should step down. And Americans -- including women and suburbanites -- are more likely to say that Democrats, and not Republicans, share their moral values."

A good thing for Hastert that he only has to worry about his Illinois district.

The news isn't much better for the GOP in this survey: "Democrats have regained a commanding position going into the final weeks of the midterm-election campaigns, with support eroding for Republicans on Iraq, ethics and presidential leadership, according to a Washington Post -ABC News poll.

"Apparent Republican gains in September have been reversed in the face of mounting U.S. casualties and gloomy forecasts from Iraq and the scandal involving Mark Foley (R-Fla.), who was forced to resign his congressional post over sexually graphic online conversations with former House pages . . .

"Fifty-five percent of those surveyed said congressional Democrats deserve to be reelected next month, but just 39 percent said Republicans deserve to return to office."

My standard consumer warning: It's 435 separate elections, so that generic figure is only a rough gauge of the country's mood.

And the poll-o-rama continues: "A Capitol Hill sex scandal has reinforced public doubts about Republican leadership and pushed Democrats to a huge lead in the race for control of Congress four weeks before Election Day, the latest USA TODAY /Gallup Poll shows.

"Democrats had a 23-point lead over Republicans in every group of people questioned -- likely voters, registered voters and adults -- on which party's House candidate would get their vote. That's double the lead Republicans had a month before they seized control of Congress in 1994 and the Democrats' largest advantage among registered voters since 1978.

"Nearly three in 10 registered voters said their representative doesn't deserve re-election -- the highest level since 1994. President Bush's approval rating was 37% in the new poll, down from 44% in a Sept. 15-17 poll."

Okay, back to the finger-pointing. Rightwing Nuthouser Rick Moran briefly blames the Dems, but reserves much of his ire for the GOP:

"I have no doubt that much of this scandal has been orchestrated by Democrats to gain maximum political advantage. I think one would have to be brain dead to think otherwise. But Foley and his enablers (consciously or unconsciously ignoring the signs of trouble and warning bells for years) don't need Democrats to make themselves look negligent or worse, like a bunch of calculating, back room politicos more concerned with the electoral impact of Foley's misdeeds than in protecting the children whose safety had been entrusted to them by their parents.

"Foley was a bomb waiting to go off. Whether some Democratic operatives nudged the scandal along by feeding the media is really not the point, although I find it fascinating in a historical sense to trace the origins of the information to expose the creeps who apparently wish to out gay Republicans regardless of whether or not they wish to have their sexual orientation made public. These low lifes are the hypocrites not the gay Republicans. To browbeat the GOP for supporting a President whose anti-terrorist measures they believe violate American's privacy while looking on with satisfaction and cheering as the most personal, private details of a person's life are plastered all over some bottom feeder's website is where the real hypocrisy in this whole scandal resides."

Did Dick Cheney give Bob Woodward the same anatomical advice he gave Pat Leahy? I don't know the specifics, but Woodward did say this on "Meet the Press":

"WOODWARD: Well, he called to complain that I was quoting him about the meetings with Henry Kissinger that he and the president had. I had interviewed Vice President Cheney last year a couple of times at length about material I'm gathering on the Ford administration, on-the-record interviews, but he volunteered, he said, 'Oh, by the way, Henry Kissinger comes in' and he, Dick Cheney, sits down with him once a month and the president every two or three months. And Cheney was upset I was quoting him. And I said, 'Look, this--on-the-record doesn't have anything to do with Ford, you volunteered that.' He then used a word which I can't repeat on the air. And I said, 'Look, on the record is on the record,' and he hung up on me.

"RUSSERT: What, what do you mean, he swore at you?

"MR. WOODWARD: He, he said what I was saying was bull-something . . . No, but he, but he hung up. Now, look, I can, I can see, I went back and looked at the transcript that he can--ever had a disagreement about ground rules with someone. Have you?

"RUSSERT: Well, he thought he was talking, he thought he was talking to you for one project and you used it in another project.

"WOODWARD: Well, exactly. But it had nothing to do with it, and it's clearly spelled out that it's an on-the-record interview. And so--now, what does he do instead of saying, 'Well, OK, I look at it this way, you look at it that way.' It's a metaphor for what's going on. Hang up when somebody has a different point of view or information you don't want to deal with."

Does John Kerry plan to become the next Adlai Stevenson? The Boston Globe says yes:

"Kerry himself insisted he has not decided whether to run. But more than a dozen longtime loyalists interviewed for this story said they had no doubt that Kerry would attempt what a host of Washington doubters think unimaginable: become the first Democrat in half a century to lose a general election and be renominated four years later.

"'My impression is there's no way he's not going to run,' said a confidant who speaks with Kerry regularly and asked not to be identified."

A blogger saying something good about the WashPost? Give me a second to calm down.

"This has to be some kind of journalistic milestone," says Greg Sargent in American Prospect. 'The Washington Post has, for two days running, been aggressively correcting President Bush's lies about Democrats. Put another way, the Post has been telling its readers the truth.

"On Tuesday, Bush said: 'If you don't think we should be listening in on the terrorist, then you ought to vote for the Democrats. If you want your government to continue listening in when al-Qaeda planners are making phone calls into the United States, then you vote Republican.' The Post story, by Peter Baker, rebutted these falsehoods as follows:

"Bush's language, though, characterizes Democratic positions through his own prism. Critics of the surveillance program have not argued against listening to terrorist phone calls but say the government should get warrants from a secret intelligence court. Likewise, many critics of the tribunal measure did not oppose interrogating prisoners generally, as Bush said, but specific provisions of the bill, such as denying the right of habeas corpus or giving the president freedom to authorize what they consider torture.

"Nice. The fact-check was way too low in the story. But at least it was there.

"On Wednesday, Bush said: 'One hundred and seventy-seven of the opposition party said, 'You know, we don't think we ought to be listening to the conversations of terrorists.' The Post story on this -- also by Baker -- added the following paragraph:

"Asked about the president's statement, White House aides could not name any Democrat who has said that the government should not listen in on terrorists. Democrats who voted against the legislation had complained that it would hand too much power to the president and had said that they wanted more checks in the bill to protect civil liberties"'