To whomever sent me that box of…er…protection…your optimism regarding my sex life is greatly appreciated. 

Just so my friends know… I got a response to one of my messages in a bottle this afternoon. Finally. After so long…

You walk in an empty landscape under an endless sky. The earth under your feet is flat, hard, solid rock. Ahead of you is cliff, overlooking a great valley. There are mountains on the horizon. So far away. And…what looks like, perhaps, a city in the distance. Just at your feet is a pool of water, in a small hollow in the rock. Its surface is unnaturally calm.

Look down into it. You see your reflection. It is deceptively clear. You see yourself, here, now. As you are. Right this moment. You see every detail of your face, sharp and crystal clear, looking back at you. But unlike most people who come this way, to look into this pool, you know that this is not all there is to you. There is more. The rest of you is there, in the darkness below the surface. You know this.

Reach a hand into the water. Did you slack through most of your life? Did you walk it with your eyes closed? Your mind blissfully content with the moment? Never questioning. Never doubting. Never wondering? Then the pool is quite shallow. Your hand reaches the bottom soon, and encounters only the same hard smooth rock you have just walked across. But if you kept your eyes open, and your mind active, and your heart engaged, then it is quite deep. Your hand does not touch bottom no matter how far into it you reach. The water is cold. It is dark. It is deathly still.

Reach down as far as you can. Then stir the water. Just a little. Careful. The reflection of you, here, now, ripples away. Watch. Something else, something from deep down in the pool, shimmers up to take its place.

Be ready for what you see.

It comes to this: The republican machine is going after the teenagers Mark Foley was sexually exploiting.  That’s right.  Not the leadership that did nothing.  Not the people who tried to cover it all up.  They’re going on the offensive against the kids, as though all of this is their fault. 

Well I guess we can put a fork in the republican party now…because it’s done.  For decades they waged a long bitter battle to gain total control of the federal government.  They told us the liberals were wicked, immoral, godless, anti-American, anti-family.  They said democrats were corrupt tax and spend big government pigs, lining their pockets with money taken from hard working people.  They waged a scorched earth campaign for power.  And then they got it.  And look at them now.

What most of us with a functional conscience and a sense of basic human decency see as the sexual exploitation of teenage congressional pages, the republicans now see only in terms of political warfare.  Their pathological hatred of anyone outside of the tribe has so completely gutted them of any sense of decency and humanity, of anything at all beyond the reflexive need to attack liberals and democrats, that they are utterly incapable of seeing the sexual exploitation of teenagers for what it is.  They cannot see, cannot even grasp, Mark Foley’s actions apart from the political war. 

And in the blogosphere, all those fine honorable men who once upon a time fancied themselves liberals, but then supposedly 9-11 changed everything, and who keep on yap, yap, yapping that they didn’t leave the democratic party, it left them…all those fine honorable men with all their ostentatious regard for America and virtue and civilized behavior.  What do they do when confronted with a man in their own party who regarded the congressional page pool as his own little sexual buffet?  What do they do when confronted with evidence that their party leadership covered up that man’s behavior so as not to rouse the ire of the voters? 

Well of course…they start attacking the teenagers Foley was hitting on…

Pajamas Media, Instapundit Facilitate Outing Of Foley Victim

An obscure right-wing blogger, Wild Bill, has outed one of Mark Foley’s victims, a former Congressional page. It is a despicable act. Wild Bill however, gets almost no traffic, so the damage done to the victim’s life could have been minimal.

All that ended, however, when some of the most highly-trafficked right-wing bloggers decided to direct their readers to Wild Bill’s site. First, Roger L. Simon, co-founder and CEO of Pajamas Media – a portal and advertising broker for nearly every major right-wing blog – posted a link to Wild Bill on his personal site. (The Pajamas Media portal also linked to Wild Bill.) Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit – probably the most highly-trafficked right-wing blog – followed suit by linking to Simon’s post and the Pajamas Media post.  

You may recall this is generally how the right wing smear machine works.  First the smear appears in some obscure nutcase’s blog.  Then someone like Drudge picks up on it.  Then Instapundit links to it.  Then it starts appearing in a few right wing tabloids and magazines.  Then the more respectable conservative press gets into it.  Then it goes mainstream.  Instapundit has been facilitating smear campaigns now for years, and it’s given him a high place in the right wing honor roll.  Recently the hack novelist Roger L. (I didn’t leave the democratic party, it left me) Simon formed Pajamas Media to share in some of that glory.  It now comes to this: Glenn Reynolds and Roger L. Simon are facilitating child sexual predators, if that’s what it takes to keep the republican party in power.

They both know perfectly well that outing this one teenager, will make other teens who have been victimized by congressmen, or anyone else holding a position of authority on Capital Hill think twice before coming forward.  It increases the pressure on the entire family to keep the kid’s mouth shut.  It Is Supposed To.

Atrios sums it all up…

The complete shitheads that are the leading lights of the conservative blogosphere.

No ethics, no scruples, no morals, no compassion, no sense. Just really bad people.

Brad DeLong likes to say that the Bush administration is worse then you think, even accounting for the fact that it is worse then you think.  But that’s true of all of them…every…single…one of them…in the Bush base. That 35 percent who will support the republican party no matter what.  Because there is nothing worse then the prospect of a democratic congress…not even the sexual exploitation of minors.  Not even covering up the sexual exploitation of minors.  Garrison Keiller was right…they are republicans first, and Americans second.  Every time you think you’ve found the bottom of that cesspool you soon realize that…no…there is no bottom.

Via Joshua Marshall…  Ah…remember the day when Americans could simply speak their mind to government officals without fear of arrest…?

Arrest over Cheney barb triggers lawsuit

A Denver-area man filed a lawsuit today against a member of the Secret Service for causing him to be arrested after he approached Vice President Dick Cheney in Beaver Creek this summer and criticized him for his policies concerning Iraq.

Attorney David Lane said that on June 16, Steve Howards was walking his 7-year-old son to a piano practice, when he saw Cheney surrounded by a group of people in an outdoor mall area, shaking hands and posing for pictures with several people.

According to the lawsuit filed at U.S. District Court in Denver, Howards and his son walked to about two-to-three feet from where Cheney was standing, and said to the vice president, "I think your policies in Iraq are reprehensible," or words to that effect, then walked on.

Ten minutes later, according to Howards’ lawsuit, he and his son were walking back through the same area, when they were approached by Secret Service agent Virgil D. "Gus" Reichle Jr., who asked Howards if he had "assaulted" the vice president. Howards denied doing so, but was nonetheless placed in handcuffs and taken to the Eagle County Jail.

This being the same vice president (and president) who insist that the president of the United States simply must have the power to arrest, imprison and torture even American citizens, without due process, without any recourse to the courts, on their say-so that they’re suspected of involvement in terrorist activities.  The man is lucky he’s not in Gitmo now, and that anyone even knows what happened.

Via Atrios…  Mission Accomplished Part Deux…

WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 — Even as the Bush administration urges Americans to stay the course in Iraq, Republicans in Congress have put down a quiet marker in the apparent hope that V-I Day might be only months away.

Tucked away in fine print in the military spending bill for this past year was a lump sum of $20 million to pay for a celebration in the nation’s capital “for commemoration of success” in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Not surprisingly, the money was not spent.

Now Congressional Republicans are saying, in effect, maybe next year. A paragraph written into spending legislation and approved by the Senate and House allows the $20 million to be rolled over into 2007.

The original legislation empowered the president to designate “a day of celebration” to commemorate the success of the armed forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, and to “issue a proclamation calling on the people of the United States to observe that day with appropriate ceremonies and activities.

Actually…I am kinda surprised the money was not spent and the celebrations not held.  The republicans (and Joe Lieberman…but then, I repeat myself…) seem to think that things are going swimmingly over there and no amount of bloodshed can seem to convince them otherwise.

Via Firedoglake…  Behold the open sewer that is the republican party today…

I…words simply fail me.

In the fine tradition of George W. Bush standing under the "Mission Accomplished" sign, or any one of the Katrina backdrops (where no expense was spared to bring power to an area for a photo op, and then just as quickly cut off), we now have the head of the NRCC, Tom Reynolds, using small prop children as set decoration in a press conference devoted to the topic of…yes, predatory online sexual solicitation of minors.

Even the reporters present could not contain themselves: 

Reporter:  Congressman, do you mind asking the children to leave the room so we can have a frank discussion of this, because it’s an adult topic.  It just doesn’t seem appropriate to me.

Reynolds:  I’ll take your questions, but I’m not going to ask any of my supporters to leave.

[]

Reporter:  Who are the children, Congressman?  Who are these children?

Reynolds:  Pardon me?

Reporter:  Who are these children? 

Reynolds:   Well, a number of them are from the community.  There are several of the "thirtysomething" set that are here and uh I’ve known them and I’ve known their children as they were born. 

Reporter:  Do you think it’s appropriate for them to be listening to the subject matter though?

Reynolds:  Sir, I’ll be happy to answer your questions, I’m still, uh…

Swell.  Just swell.  They have a uTube up of the press conference at Firedoglake, and the still clearly shows Reynolds surrounded by a room full of very small children and a few other adults.  So.  We have one congressional republican using kids for Internet sex, and another one using them as literally human shields to deflect hard questions from the press.  I don’t think America can take much more of all this Family Values stuff.

Years from now…when hopefully this episode in American history is just a bad dream…take this one thing away from it if you take away nothing else:  It isn’t the quest for virtue and morality and values that turns people into this.  It’s the belief that you embody those things.   It isn’t power that corrupts absolutely…it’s arrogance.

Via AmericaBlog…  Mark Foley, Congressman…

Former Congressman Mark Foley (R-FL) interrupted a vote on the floor of the House in 2003 to engage in Internet sex with a high school student who had served as a congressional page, according to new Internet instant messages provided to ABC News by former pages.

ABC News now has obtained 52 separate instant message exchanges, which former pages say were sent by Foley, using the screen name Maf54, to two different boys under the age of 18.

This message was dated April 2003, at approximately 7 p.m., according to the message time stamp.

Maf54: I miss you
Teen: ya me too
Maf54: we are still voting
Maf54: you miss me too

The exchange continues in which Foley and the teen both appear to describe having sexual orgasms.

Maf54: ok..i better go vote..did you know you would have this effect on me
Teen: lol I guessed
Teen: ya go vote…I don’t want to keep you from doing our job
Maf54: can I have a good kiss goodnight
Teen: :-*
Teen:

The House voted that evening on HR 1559, Emergency War Time supplemental appropriations.

According to another message, Foley also invites the teen and a friend to come to his house near Capitol Hill so they can drink alcohol.

Teen: are you going to be in town over the veterans day weekend
Maf54: I may be now that your coming
Maf54: who you coming to visit
Teen: haha good stuff
Teen: umm no one really

Maf54: we will be adjourned ny then
Teen: oh good
Maf54: by
Maf54: then we can have a few drinks
Maf54: lol
Teen: yes yes ;-)
Maf54: your not old enough to drink
Teen: shhh…
Maf54: ok
Teen: that’s not what my ID says
Teen: lol
Maf54: ok
Teen: I probably shouldn’t be telling you that huh
Maf54: we may need to drink at my house so we don’t get busted 

Uhm…Mark…  You’re a Lawmaker…

Okay…at least one of these teens wasn’t nearly as embarrassed by this as the other one was.  But there is still no excuse.  What a kid may want to do with an adult is one thing.  But part of being an adult is you know what your responsibility to kids is.  And Foley was a lawmaker.  That’s (if you’ve read your Constitution lately) what congress does.  So…to recap…Foley walks away from a vote in progress, to have IM sex with a teenager, and then in another message suggests they all get together at his house for a little underage drinking where they might not get busted for it.  Sweet.  If either one of those kids grows up to be a responsible adult they won’t have Mark Foley to thank for setting an example.

And…not anyone in the republican leadership either.  So remind me again, what is the value to young Americans to serve as congressional pages?  I can see the value to the republican congress easy enough.  Free labor…a handy pool of awe stricken kids who are easily manipulated into having sex… 

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.

Via This Modern World…  Two Peas In A Pod…

Cardinal Law, meet Speaker Hastert.  You’d think Watergate would have taught at least the republicans that it isn’t the crime, it’s the coverup that kills you.  But then this is the party that wanted to do Vietnam all over again in Iraq.

Joshua Marshall at Talking Points Memo is positively astonished by what he’s seeing now…

I’ve been at this blog racket for almost six years. And usually you’ve got to really pore over the details to find the inconsistencies and contradictions. So I’m not sure I’ve ever seen this big a train wreck where leaders at the highest eschelons of power repeatedly fib, contradict each other and change their stories so quickly. It’s mendacity as performance art; you can see the story unravel in real time.

Just consider, Denny Hastert has repeatedly said he didn’t know anything about the Foley problem until Thursday. But two members of the leadership — Boehner and Reynolds — say no, they warned him about it months ago. Hastert got Boehner to recant; Reynolds is sticking to his guns.

Rodney Alexander brought the matter to the Speaker’s office. And Hastert’s office tonight put out the results of a detailed internal review of what happened in which they revealed that no member of the House leadership — not Hastert or Shimkus or the House Clerk — had actually laid eyes on the emails in question.

…

At present, the Speaker is committed to portraying himself as a sort of Speaker Magoo. We’re supposed to believe that pretty much everyone in the House GOP leadership knew about this but him.

These fibs and turnabouts amount to a whole far larger than the sum of its parts. Even the most cynical politicians carefully vet their stories to assure that they cannot easily be contradicted by other credible personages. When you see Majority Leaders and Speakers and Committee chairs calling each other liars in public you know that the underlying story is very bad, that the system of coordination and hierarchy has broken down and that each player believes he’s in a fight for his life.

Well…they’ve been they’ve been deliberately rousing the passion of the mob against democrats for their support for civil liberties, and women’s and gay rights. And in particular, they’ve been playing the Homosexual Menace card as a way to drive their base to the polls.  This is what they were doing in the swing states last election…

The entire religious right machine has been doing this for decades now, because their polling tells them that anti-gay hate will motivate a certain group of voters more then Any of their other pet causes.  More then abortion.  More then prayer in school.  More then creationism.  

So the religious right has been carefully, meticulously stoking that hatred for decades. It funds anti-gay propaganda mills like Paul Cameron, to churn out one hysterical lie after another about the homosexual menace.  Ex-gay ministries like Exodus and Love In Action would have gone out of business long ago, were it not for the lifesaving injection of funds by religious right powerhouses like James Dobson’s Focus On The Family.  They exist today, not to save homosexuals from The Gay Lifestyle, but to allow heterosexuals to continue denying their gay and lesbian neighbors equal rights without a guilty conscience.  Anti-Gay hate has been a gold mine to them, in terms of money and votes, in a way nothing else ever could be.  And in the process, stoked a terrible hatred and contempt toward a portion of the human family, with utterly no concern whatsoever about the inevitable bloodshed, death and heartbreak.  They would pile our bodies up in stacks like cords of firewood if they had to, so long as it got them votes.  And money.

And now that Frankenstein’s Monster is looking at them.  Well…at the republicans.  In the panic on Capital Hill, it must really gall the republican leadership to watch various religious right figures distancing themselves from All Those Corrupt Politicians, as if they hadn’t all been playing this game of Hate For Power together all these years.  And they know they don’t dare point their fingers back at the ministers of hate for any of this.  But the religious right has it’s own gallery of Mark Foleys to account for.  Just ask Cardinal Bernard Law.

Or…this guy…

At least Swaggart’s prostitutes were of age.  I think.  But the same reckless disregard for human sexuality that drove Mark Foley away from a life as an out and proud gay man, and into the chat rooms of teenaged boys, keeps driving one man of the cloth after another into their local red light districts, year after year after year.  It’s a vicious cycle of teaching people to be ashamed of their sexual nature, and that shame warping their sex lives, making them even more ashamed, and ready to be manipulated.  And thus shame turns into money…and votes.

Mark Foley is not the monster here…let’s get that clear.  He’s a profoundly disturbed man, but he is no monster.  The monsters are the harvesters of shame.  The players who know Exactly what they’re doing when they teach people to fear and loath their sexual nature, coldly unconcerned with the human wreakage it causes so long as there is money to be had, and votes to be counted.  They could teach a healthy respect for human nature, for sexual desire, and how to deal with it responsibly, and honorably, and break the cycle of shame and abuse.  Think of a world where kids didn’t have to be afraid of adults.  Now think of the kind of person who could not survive in a world without shame, who would gladly unleash a hundred Mark Foleys on the teenagers of the world, so long as it meant more shame, more dollars in the collection plate, more votes on election day.  There’s your monster.

Via Fark.Com…  Mark Foley’s Greatest Hits…June 2003 edition…

Nude summer youth camps alarm lawmaker

U.S. Rep. Mark Foley, one of Washington’s leading advocates for missing and exploited kids, doesn’t like the idea of a clothes-free camp for teenagers. After reading a story Wednesday in the New York Times, he decided to raise a fuss.

Foley, running for the U.S. Senate seat held by Bob Graham, plans to deliver letters today to Gov. Jeb Bush and Attorney General Charlie Crist, singling out Lake Como nudist resort in Land O’Lakes, which hosted a bare-skinned youth camp that ended last week.

Foley said the camp, sponsored by the American Association for Nude Recreation, appears to exploit children to make money.

The camps operate under a Florida law that allows people to be nude as long as they’re not lewd. Foley wonders if state statutes should change. Thus the letters to Bush and Crist.

"What’s wrong with your kids going to Boy Scouts, Campfire Girls or sports camps?" Foley, the West Palm Beach Republican, said Wednesday from Washington. "It’s beyond the pale that this is a normal way to bring up a 14-year-old child."

…

Foley, a fifth term congressman, denies that he’s raising the nude camping issue to bolster his chances for the Republican nomination for Senate.

Well your chances of holding any office at all are pretty slim now aren’t they?

Le Dance Pathetique…as choreographed by Ben Stein…

Un…

The Representative Foley "scandal" is really worthy of a whole book on hypocrisy…

Deux…

On the one hand, we have a poor misguided Republican man who had a romantic thing for young boys…

Trois…

On the other hand, we have a Democratic party that worships (not likes, WORSHIPS) a man named Bill Clinton who did not send suggestive e-mails as far as we know, but who had a barely legal intern give him oral sex…

Quatre…

We have a Republican man in Congress who sent e-mails to teenage boys asking them what they were wearing…

Cinq…

…and an entire party, the Democrats, whose primary constituency, besides the teachers’ unions, is homosexual men and lesbian women…

Six…

I hope it won’t come as a surprise to anyone that a big part of male homosexual behavior is interest in young boys…

Sept…

Don’t get me wrong. My very best friend is gay.

Le Curtian…Applaus a Voux… 

Via Firedoglake…the unsurprises just keep on coming.  Here’s another republican operative and closet case, Matt Drudge, on the despicable predatory sexual behavior of…wait for it…teenage boys …

And if anything, these kids are less innocent — these 16 and 17 year-old beasts…and I’ve seen what they’re doing on YouTube and I’ve seen what they’re doing all over the Internet — oh yeah — you just have to tune into any part of their pop culture.  You’re not going to tell me these are innocent babies.  Have you read the transcripts that ABC posted going into the weekend of these instant messages, back and forth?  The kids are egging the Congressman on!  The kids are trying to get this out of him.  We haven’t got the whole story on this.

Well we’ve got the whole story on you Matt, now don’t we? 

You could say "well Drudge, it’s abuse of power, a congressman abusing these impressionable, young 17 year-old beasts, talking about their sex lives with a grown man, on the internet."  Because you have to remember, those of us who have seen some of the transcripts of these nasty instant messages.  This was two ways, ladies and gentlemen.  These kids were playing Foley for everything he was worth.   Oh yeah.  Oh, I haven’t…they were talking about how many times they’d masturbated, how many times they’d done it with their girlfriends this weekend…all these things and these "innocent children."  And this "poor" congressman sitting there typing, "oh am I going to get any," you know?

Well those shameless young hussies.  Strutting their stuff in front of that poor closet case of a wack job republican congresscritter.  Maybe next congress they’ll put them all in burkas just in case there are any grown adults on capital hill who can’t fucking control their libidos, let alone can’t remember that part of being an adult is Fucking Setting A Goddamn Example!

Obviously the difference between an adolescent and a child is that the teenager is becoming sexually mature.  But the operative word there is becoming.  At Minimum it is not the prerogative of grown adults to indulge that sexual inexperience and immaturity, to push a kid’s buttons when the kid is only just discovering that the buttons are even there to begin with, for the sake of their own greedy selfish urges…I won’t even dignify it with that beautiful word desire.  Jesus Christ Almighty!  Adults are supposed to be teaching and encouraging kids at that stage in their lives how to Fucking Manage Their Sexual Nature Responsibly And Honorably not exploiting their inexperience, their naivety, their adolescence, for pleasure, like they’re some kind of sexual junk food.  At long last, at long fucking last, is there Anyone left in the republican party that knows how to be an adult?

I can see where a kid would be positively creeped out by what Foley was doing.  But I’m 53 years old now, and I can see something else perfectly well: how deliberately, how calculatedly Foley was pushing that kid’s buttons. There is no mistaking it for what it is.  Foley was taking sexual advantage of that kid…even if at that point he hadn’t laid a fucking hand on him.  I can see how a kid would be creeped out.  But as an adult I can see something more.  At our age (Foley is a year younger then me it seems) even a guy who has very little life experience knows perfectly well where those buttons are, and just how to push them.  That’s what’s so disturbing.  Foley is sexually manipulating that kid and the kid sort-of seems to realize it, but he’s still too young to really grasp what’s going on the way a mature adult can.

And the profound embarrassment lurking just behind that kid’s words are palpable to me.  Drudge it seems, can only see the surface bravado…but not the heart…of a kid.  Why is that not surprising?  Are they fucking all a bunch of sociopaths in the republican establishment?

It appears that at least some of the page boys were warned to keep a good safe distance from Foley.  That is…only the republican page boys…

GOP Staff Warned Pages About Foley in 2001

A Republican staff member warned congressional pages five years ago to watch out for Congressman Mark Foley, according to a former page.

Matthew Loraditch, a page in the 2001-2002 class, told ABC News he and other pages were warned about Foley by a supervisor in the House Clerk’s office.

Loraditch, the president of the Page Alumni Association, said the pages were told "don’t get too wrapped up in him being too nice to you and all that kind of stuff."

…

Pages report to either Republican or Democratic supervisors, depending on the political party of the member of Congress who nominate them for the page program.

Several Democratic pages tell ABC News they received no such warnings about Foley.

Well isn’t that…unsurprising…