And the unsurprises just keep on coming…  Another cog in the republican Mighty Wurlitzer, The Wall Street Journal, says the blame for the Foley scandal rests squarely with all this PC tolerance of homosexuality crap republicans are having to put up with these days…

What next was Mr. Hastert supposed to do with an elected Congressman? Assume that Mr. Foley was a potential sexual predator and bar him from having any private communication with pages? Refer him to the Ethics Committee? In retrospect, barring contact with pages would have been wise.

But in today’s politically correct culture, it’s easy to understand how senior Republicans might well have decided they had no grounds to doubt Mr. Foley merely because he was gay and a little too friendly in emails. Some of those liberals now shouting the loudest for Mr. Hastert’s head are the same voices who tell us that the larger society must be tolerant of private lifestyle choices, and certainly must never leap to conclusions about gay men and young boys. Are these Democratic critics of Mr. Hastert saying that they now have more sympathy for the Boy Scouts’ decision to ban gay scoutmasters? Where’s Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on that one?

So is the Wall Street Journal calling for a ban on gay congressmen then, on those same grounds?  That was a rhetorical question.  Without a doubt they would if they thought they could get away with it. 

As if this was rocket science.   All you have to do to grasp the magnitude of the failure on the part of the republican leadership is ask yourself if any warning flags should have been raised if a heterosexual  congressman made comments about a female page’s body, and asked for pictures of her friend.  I’ll bet most parents of teenage daughters would instantly pick up on the subtext of that kind of email.  You don’t need to set different standards of behavior for gay adults.  Just treat them the same as any heterosexual in a similar context. 

I know…I know…it’s Capital Hill.  Maybe they just need to set a minimum age of 70 to be a congressional page, or at least to be a republican page. 

Joshua Marshall has this from a reader… 

There’s a weak excuse emerging from Republicans for Foleygate – they might have known about the e-mails to Rep. Alexander’s page, but they never knew about the explicit IMs. Too much of the media coverage right now is centering on that question, as if knowledge of the IMs is the only way to show the leadership was remiss.

But that’s irrelevant, and here’s why: Once ABC got hold of the e-mails, it took them one day to flush out the IMs. That’s what an actual investigation looks like. The Republican leadership simply didn’t want to know how bad the Foley situation was. That’s just as morally negligent as if they had started digging and found the IMs.

[Emphasis mine]  All these fuckers had to do was look into the matter.  That’s fucking all.  Didn’t matter if it was a heterosexual congressman or a gay one.  If it looked even vaguely inappropriate all they fucking had to do was look into it.  Maybe it amounts to nothing and then they just quietly drop it.  But all they fucking had to do was lift their little finger and look into it and they didn’t.  It took ABC one day, just one fucking day, to get to the rest of the horrid story.  To blame all this on PC coddling of homosexuals is grotesque.  But then the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page is pretty much the same kind of creeps that are in the republican leadership. 

That Wall Street Journal editorial fairly drips with longing for the old days.  Back in the 1950s a scandal like this would have resulted in gay purges and witch hunts from one end of the country to the other, and these right wing louts are probably crying in their beer right this moment that it isn’t happening now, that America has matured enough regarding homosexuality that it isn’t going to go into wholesale convulsions of anti-gay hate for what one pathetic closet case republican did.  Now all the old guard can do is piss and moan about political correctness while the rest of the nation looks on appalled at this complete failure of oversight on the part of a party that’s made Family Values its pet issue, and wonders, rightly, just how safe their children are from heterosexual republicans.  There’s not a single person in the republican leadership who signed on to the Adam Walsh Act who isn’t involved somehow in this coverup.