The Blond One comments on Foley

And gets it right, as usual:

At least liberals are finally exhibiting a moral compass about something. I am sure that they'd be equally outraged if Rep. Mark Foley were a Democrat.

The object lesson of Foley's inappropriate e-mails to male pages is that when a Republican congressman is caught in a sex scandal, he immediately resigns and crawls off into a hole in abject embarrassment. Democrats get snippy.

Foley didn't claim he was the victim of a "witch-hunt." He didn't whine that he was a put-upon "gay American." He didn't stay in Congress and haughtily rebuke his critics. He didn't run for re-election. He certainly didn't claim he was "saving the Constitution." (Although his recent discovery that he has a drinking problem has a certain Democratic ring to it.)

In 1983, Democratic congressman Gerry Studds was found to have sexually propositioned House pages and actually buggered a 17-year-old male page whom he took on a trip to Portugal. The 46-year-old Studds indignantly attacked those who criticized him for what he called a "mutually voluntary, private relationship between adults."

When the House censured Studds for his sex romp with a male page, Studds — not one to be shy about presenting his backside to a large group of men — defiantly turned his back on the House during the vote. He ran for re-election and was happily returned to office five more times by liberal Democratic voters in his Martha's Vineyard district. (They really liked his campaign slogan: "It's the outfit, stupid.")

Washington Post columnist Colman McCarthy referred to Studds' affair with a teenage page as "a brief consenting homosexual relationship" and denounced Studds' detractors for engaging in a "witch-hunt" against gays: "New England witch trials belong to the past, or so it is thought. This summer on Cape Cod, the reputation of Rep. Gerry Studds was burned at the stake by a large number of his constituents determined to torch the congressman for his private life."

Meanwhile, Foley is hiding in a hole someplace.

No one demanded to know why the Democratic speaker of the House, Thomas "Tip" O'Neill, took one full decade to figure out that Studds was propositioning male pages.

But now, the same Democrats who are incensed that Bush's National Security Agency was listening in on al-Qaida phone calls are incensed that Republicans were not reading a gay congressman's instant messages.

Let's run this past the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals: The suspect sent an inappropriately friendly e-mail to a teenager — oh also, we think he's gay. Can we spy on his instant messages? On a scale of 1 to 10, what are the odds that any court in the nation would have said: YOU BET! Put a tail on that guy — and a credit check, too!

Like I said the other day. Compare the way Republicans react to something like this with the way Democrats do and ask yourself who you want running the House.