"But the father of all this misery comes from the decision made by Hastert and/or his staff to keep the parental complaint about Foley from the bipartisan Page Board. House procedures call for complaints regarding pages to be handled by the Page Board, and no one -- not even Denny Hastert -- has provided a single explanation as to why they neglected to do so," per Ed Morrissey. I thought nandrews3 in the 11:03 comment added something:
Captain Ed has been a voice of common sense regarding the House leadership, ever since he called out Hastert for lying about when he was notified about Foley's e-mails. That clumsy bit of attempted misdirection seemed to prompt Ed's call for Hastert's resignation as speaker. If others can't bring themselves to accept Ed's conclusions, maybe it's because they didn't notice that Hastert was jerking them around as well. Or maybe they just can't admit it.
Ed is also right about Hastert's refusal to follow proper channels and notify the Page Board about Foley's e-mails. There's no defending that decision, in retrospect. The thing to point out about it is that it wasn't some kind of mysterious anomaly. DeLay, Hastert, and their committee chairs spent years shutting House Democrats out of the legislative process. Keeping the Democratic member of the Page Board from knowing anything about Foley's e-mails was a simple case of the system working as it was intended to work.
Having kept all responsibilities out of the hands of the other side, House leaders ended up with nowhere to spread the blame, except to each other. (And George Soros too, apparently. Good luck making that charge stick.) Hastert is now left with the consequences, one of which is that his public reputation is fatally damaged.
Would you really want him showing up in your district? Everywhere he goes now, he's going to be a symbol of (a) the failure to protect pages from Mark Foley, and (b) the failure to accept blame and act accordingly. Apparently he doesn't even recognize this, but gleeful Democrats certainly do. Ed and a few other commenters recognize it too, and they have been patiently trying to get others here to accept reality. Looks like this may be an impossible task.
An earlier post in Jane Galt prepared me for the significance of Hastert's administrative mistake.
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3 comments:
Mike
why did Hastert risk his career over Foley? I don't understand it.
Trish, I find the suggestion in Jane Galt that a female of age about 16 might be more psychologically adroit, than a male of 16, at deflecting being a sexual object of an older man remarkably insightful. For a boy, perhaps somewhat still in the 'you go talk to her' stage, finding themselves seen as the object of sexual aggression in fantasy is more threatening; it may in fact remain so. As to Hastert resigning, it doesn't make sense to men. I think we look at the 'facts' of the e-mails. We don't use the intuition a female might as to what Foley was up to. This is a part of the deflection in which 'chess' moves might be anticipated and the bishop moved to protect the queen. Referring to the Page Board would have put 'the bishop' into play. Hastert just didn't think into the moves if you will.
I think women do unconsciously rely on intuition in many instances.
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