Blog P.I.

Edwin Edwards, former Louisiana governor and connoisseur of corruption (now spending his golden years in the slammer), was once quoted saying the only way he could lose re-election was if “caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.” Which is pretty much what’s happening to the House Republicans right now.

The rightosphere has always been less partisan than the leftosphere, or at any rate, more anti-Dem than pro-GOP. The liberal netroots count maybe a few Republicans that they like, while the conservative blogs include right-trending Democrats such as Ann Althouse, Roger L. Simon and more libertarians than you can point a :CueCat at. You don’t even have to call yourself a conservative to be in the club.

Because this coalition is built largely around foreign policy issues, they’re not very quick to defend the GOP on domestic issues or when the party is in trouble. And this very moment, you can see the right half of the blogosphere splitting into two camps over the question of Denny Hastert’s future as House Speaker (the matter of course being brought into sharp relief by today’s Washington Times editorial page).

For lack of better phraseology, let’s call these camps the parsers and the partisans. The former camp is concerned most with being on the right side of this particular issue, the latter is quicker to forgive leadership for errors and even not recognize errors as such (and yes, I realize that this description telegraphs my own view of the matter). Here’s the breakdown…

First, there is the side saying Hastert Must Go:

• Ed Morrissey is one of several to scoff at Times editorialist Tony Blankley’s suggestion of Rep. Hyde to temporarily fill Hastert’s shoes, but he agrees it should be someone:

  Incredibly, no one apparently ever asked any of Foley’s former or current pages if they had noticed any inappropriate behavior from the Congressman. What kind of an investigation doesn’t address the reality of patterns in allegedly predatory behavior? Foley’s uncommon interest in young teenage boys had become parlor talk among the pages, but either Hastert didn’t want to find that out or deliberately avoided it. Hastert apparently made the decision not to follow procedures and refer the matter to the Page Board, the bipartisan committee that oversees pages, and that looks very clearly like a cover-up.

• Rick Moran doesn’t quite call for Hastert’s dismissal, but is clearly sympathetic:

  What is needed is a reckoning — a settling of accounts by the voters for all the broken promises, the wasteful spending, the arrogant mismanagement, and the irresponsible lawmaking which have combined to bring the Republican party to its sorriest state I’ve seen in my 30 years of membership.

• Gregory Djerejian, never much of a party guy to begin with, finds some validation in this turn of events:

  Gross negligence and deliberately looking the other way? Say it ain’t so! Why, this might well sum up a large amount of our contemporary history these past five years.

• For Dr. Steven Taylor, Hastert’s ouster would be long overdue:

  In general, there ought to be built-in changes in leadership probably every six years or so–and not just musical chairs at the top (i.e., Majority Leader to Speaker, Whip to Majority Leader, etc.). Anyone who has ever worked in the same organization for any length of time knows that new blood is vital, and that frequently those who become entrenched in positions tend to become overly comfortable and problematic over time.

• La Shawn Barber hears excuses, and would prefer not to:

  Whether or not the leadership saw “lurid” IMs is not quite the point. Members knew about Foley’s “overly friendly” e-mails to 16-year-old boys. From that they could have deduced he was up to no good, in my opinion. They should have investigated Foley’s conduct more thoroughly. That they didn’t know the extent of Foley’s “issues” is BS. I’m sorry, but this CYA stuff is not going to cut it.

• That’s about how The Sundries Shack sees it:

  Hastert knew about at least some of the communications between Mark Foley and an underaged boy. Even if he didn’t know about the sexually explicit communications, it seems obvious that Hastert did little to rectify the situation.

• James Joyner draws an appropriate — and blog-related! — parallel:

  When the Trent Lott-Strom Thurmond scandal broke a few years back, my instinct was that Lott was merely buttering up an old man upon his retirement rather than saying that segregation was a good thing. Regardless, I thought he should resign simply because he displayed such poor judgment as to be demonstrably unfit to hold such an important office. Ditto Mr. Hastert.

Second, there are those who say Don’t Scapegoat Hastert:

• GOPBloggers contributor Mark Noonan is not yet ready to judge Hastert:

  My wife saw a friend leaving work the other day with a man who wasn’t her husband. Is this a red flag? What should we do with such information? … I’m never going to agree to punish people for things they didn’t do. Neither Speaker Hastert nor any other member of Congress is responsible for Foley’s reprehensible behaviour unless they were 100% informed of all that Foley had done and then they did nothing about it.

• Considering Hugh Hewitt’s support for onetime SCOTUS nominee Harriet Miers, it should come as no surprise that he doesn’t want Hastert to resign, either:

  To do so would be to capitulate to Democratic-activist-induced and MSM-abetted hysteria. Not only should Hastert not resign, he should use every opportunity to swing back hard at a MSM deeply compromised by its ideological extremism and a Democratic Party committed to retreat and defeat in Iraq and fecklessness in the war generally.

• Like Hewitt, Flopping Aces would like to turn this back on the Democrats:

  Stop the hysteria. Because ONE Republican turned out to be gay and had a thing for teenage men does not mean you can throw a blanket over the whole party. If that was the case then the blanket could have been thrown over the Democrats many times over since Studds and all the way up to Jefferson.

• One Republican is getting some inadvertant bad publicity out of all this. At TownHall, Mary Katharine Ham writes:

  You know what this feels like to me? This is a classic McCain Move on the part of the Times. Get a jump on the moral high ground, condemn someone in the severest terms before the evidence necessarily justifies it. Result? You end up looking like an unassailable saint and you get a whole lotta press out of the deal. Sweet.

• John Hawkins sounds the same note about McCain, adding:

  Although I’m not a big fan of Hastert either, falsely accusing him of covering up for a sexual predator so he can be kicked under the bus and replaced is a little too vulgar, even for the brass knuckled world of Washington Politics.

• Perhaps most combative is Macsmind, hitting back at weak-kneed Republicans. And this is before he saw the Times editorial:

  Quite frankly for some of the conservatives crapping in their pants this isn’t about Foley, it’s about Harriet Miers, Dubai, and Fences. Get the hell over it already! The Bible says that he who makes a judgement without knowing all the facts is a fool, and we are seeing a lot of fools come out, especially on the Right. Thank God not all have the backbone of a rubberband. … Remember, vitue can be a vice in war, and ladies and gents we are at war.

• A few are drawing not-unfounded equivalencies between the House GOP and the news outlets that had the e-mails. The Strata-Sphere is one:

  The excuses proffered by these media organizations about why they did not pursue the matter are identical to those offered up by Hastert. So if these news organizations (who had only the marginal emails - we have some suspicions about Ross and ABC who do not make that claim) then it is good enough for Hastert and company

• Don Surber is another, cleverly if tenuously:

  The Times just lost its human resources manager because he tried to seduce a 13-year-old girl online. Using the logic of the Times, there is only one thing to do: Wesley Pruden, editor in chief, must resign.

• Almost but not quite splitting the difference, Erick Erickson at Red State calls on Republicans to walk first and then chew gum:

  Let’s be clear — now is not the time to have a leadership struggle. We’re five weeks from an election that isn’t looking very good. But, should the GOP somehow be able to keep the House in Republican hands (and Lord I hope they can!), the Speaker must go when the House returns.

Hastert is in deep trouble now, and despite what he says today, is probably beyond rescue. I suspect the Hastert defenders will slowly start changing their minds. Sometimes the manager gets sacked, even if it’s not exactly his fault.

It really doesn’t matter whether he lied about knowing of the Foley e-mails late last week. If he did, that’s worse, but even if he didn’t, the House GOP should have still interviewed former pages, not to mention informed the Democrat on the page system committee, not to mention other Republicans on that committee.

Those were errors of moral judgment, and as often happens, they’re being followed by errors of political judgment. Starting with NRCC chair Tom Reynolds’ refusal to be “thrown under a bus,” as he put it, message discipline in the caucus has broken down, and it’s only a matter of time before the coup comes. The only real question is whether it’s before the Republicans lose the election or after.