The House Republican leadership knew of now-ex-Rep. Mark Foley’s inappropriate e-mails to Congressional pages a year ago, and ABC News didn’t report on them until the end of this last week — but if you were reading the right blogs, you’d have gotten wind of it nearly a month ago: As Clarice Feldman, Tom Maguire and others are pointing out today, the Stop Sex Predators blog that first made the Mark Foley e-mails available last week is highly suspicious, to say the least, as is Daily Kos two-comment wonder WHInternNow, who first mentioned Foley’s page problem on Sept. 5:
They are probably also the same person: On Sept. 24, WHInternNow posted a dKos diary about the SSP posts almost as soon as the scans went up, but claimed to have innocently stumbled upon them via Google. Yeah, right.
And earlier this last week, before ABC’s Brian Ross obtained the more-damning Foley IMs and took the story national, Wonkette’s Alex Pareene took notice of SSP’s e-mails, and was uncharacteristically constrained in deeming the e-mails false (somehow I don’t think Nick Denton is paying him to be responsible). To be fair, the skepticism was certainly warranted. Feldman explains why:
In July a blog appeared, designed it said to trace sex predators. Few posts were made in that month or the following month. All recounted years old stories. Then on September 18, the blog printed the fairly innocuous email exchange [Note: That is not how I'd characterize them.] between Congressman Foley and an unnamed page. … How likely is it that this site with virtually no readership , few posts and hardly any history or posts of interest suddenly receives this bombshell? I’d say slight. About as likely as Lucy Ramirez handing Burkett Bush’s TANG papers.
Yesterday morning, I sent a message to stopsexpredators@gmail.com asking whether they could dissuade me from my own suspicion that the site was created in late July with the intent of eventually releasing the Foley e-mails. Needless to say, I haven’t received a response.
What I find interesting — baffling, really — is this: Why did the blog’s creator(s) even bother with the unpersuasive posting history? Why fake it if you can’t be convincing? As we’re seeing, it didn’t take very long for questions to arise about the source of this information. This hack job only makes it more likely it came from an interested DC group rather than, say, the pages who received them in the first place. If SSP’s author had merely posted them to a brand new Blogspot page without the shoddy posting history, the Foley e-mails might’ve been taken more seriously. At least the situation doesn’t lack for irony: The facts reported by the blog appear to be legitimate, while the blog itself appears to not be. Is this a new variation on that storied phrase, “fake but accurate”?
Questions also remain about why this blogger didn’t release the explicit IMs. One possibility is that they didn’t have the IMs — but considering the deliberately clandestine moves by SSP’s anonymous author, this seems unlikely. Feldman fingers the lefty watchdog group CREW as a possible source for the IM conversations, and it certainly is their kind of issue — but evidence is lacking. For want of a better explanation — and Foley’s hometown paper sure isn’t providing it — I’m inclined to go with Maguire here:
Maybe the blog author was an unwitting catspaw, but I would want some assurance that this was not simply a successful attempt to promote a story that wasn’t quite ready for the Mainstream Media by laundering it through some blogs.
If we’re defining success as getting the story into the mainstream media without the source being publicly identified, then yes, it was a success. If success is defined as getting the story into the blogosphere without the vehicle being identified as an impostor, not so much.
P.S. The House Republican leadership is already on the hot seat over its previous investigation into the matter, even with partisan Republicans. (So too is the St. Pete Times, but their editors aren’t coming up for election soon.)
Lately, conservatives have resigned themselves to hoping the Republicans would lose control of the House, as a necessary measure to put the party back on the right track — but one imagines they didn’t want it to happen quite like this.
P.P.S. This is not at all surprising. It sounds like it was conventional wisdom on the Hill that Foley was bad news for underage Hill staffers, which makes it all the more interesting that neither the St. Pete Times nor the House leadership asked enough questions. The left is attacking Hastert et al, and the right is attacking the media. They’re probably both right.
Pop into JOM we have some evidence that the emails on the black blog were faked up, that site BTW has been scrubbed and sanitized but we have scrren shots of the original. And, it is possible that no one came forth mysteriously overnight to ABC with IM’s long hidden. It’s possible someone hacked into Foley’s computer to get them.
the donks are so desperate they’re attacking their homosexual voters, and the youth vote. Because they’re at the bottom of their barrel. And, they can’t win any other way!
Why is the youth vote gonna be at risk?
First off, America’s youth today, unlike the flower children during vietnam, bear no hostilities to our military.
And, the other thing?
To “get” Foley, on this charge of improper Instant Messages, you’d have to know that the HOUSE recently passed legislation making it illegal for minors to write about masturbation. And, other “spanky” stuff.
While the name of this particular ADULT is being kept a secret; what you know is the kid was interested in politics, and through his high school got selected to be a PAGE. (Where on the HILL Foley was known to be gay.)
The age of consent in DC is 16, for males. Which makes sense. If you know anything about hormones.
As to ambitions, who goes to washington DC to be a page EXCEPT KIDS who are interested in politics. (And, this one “saved” these messages. So you can assume he “hopes to be a player.” And, he’s selected the donk party.) Not likely to get there from here.
As Foley is heading into rehab. For treatment of alcoholism.
By the way, the messages were written miles apart. Foley was in a motel. out of town. And, this male was egging him on. Drudge read some of it on air. Lots of LOL stuff. And, talk about masturbaton, I suppose? Pretty stupid stuff. Inane. Almost as insane as the laws we once had that forced Lenny Bruce to commit suicide.
Do you remember when you couldn’t say certain words? No, you don’t? Well, there was a time we had limitations put on words you could use in print. Got blown out of the water.
The new rules about the Internet? Cooked up in CONGRESS. Which will cost the donks more than the GOPsters. Since it’s the donks who are begging yet again in print (NEVER HAVING LEARNEED A THING FROM THE PLAME AFFAIR). To “ask for an investigation.”
Just you wait and see what law got broken! Because it deals with limitations placed on the Internet. Never been tried in court, either. A brand new thing.
Costly to the donks? Gee. Let’s just wait and see.
BTW the emails are innocuous. It’s the IM’s which ABC said it got only the other day which contain sexual matter.
Watchdogs are supposed to bark the instant they get a whiff of a bad guy. If they don’t, they’re only useful as lap dogs.
The SSP site didn’t seem to know whether it was an activist or a tabloid, with all the over-the-top headlines. That made it sound fishy to me.
Do read Dean Barnett’s piece at Hugh Hewitt’s blog about the particular sickness of bloggers. Your headline “Real Scandal, Fake Blog” makes his point perfectly. We are so focused on the politics of events that everything gets viewed and colored in those terms. Barnett is right, something human goes missing when that’s the case. In the eyes of nomal people, the “real scandal” is not the fake blog, but that a older man, a congressman in fact, would would engage is such dialog with young boys.
Clarice, they can’t hear you when you say there is a difference between the emails and IMs. See this over and over.
You can always tell you’re dealing with a moron when they use the term “Donks” instead of “Democrats.”
“Observer…” is correct that “donks” is not an acceptable term for Democrats, even though I heard it from then Congressman Gore when I worked in DC some 30 years back. The better term for Democrats also derives from their symbol, but has a tie-in to Hollywood. From now on, call a Democrat, especially those with pretentious noms de ‘net like “observer…”, a Jackass.
Right now, the Jackass Party still has no solutions for America’s problems abroad. The Jackass Party wants to abort the present economic recovery through higher taxes. The Jackass Party is truly the party of special interests such as tort lawyers and union bureaucrats. The Jackass Party now wants the electorate to focus on one congressman’s disgusting sex scandal where there has been no perjury and no one below DC’s age of consent (16) and not focus on the Jackasses’ utter paucity of ideas.
Say what you will, but the Reps’ leadership KNEW their guy was diddling underage boys and they let it slide cuz they don’t want to lose a house seat. It’s shameful.