Some more Foley

Here is another thought on the Foley business. In an editorial today The Washington Times called on Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert to resign over the Foley affair. My first reaction to this was that the Times was participating in what I term "Me Too Conservatism".

Me Too Conservatism is what happens when Republicans spot Democrats doing something and immediately run after them shouting "me too, me too!". The Democrats were caterwauling about a bunch of perverted instant messages the Rep. Foley sent to a 16 year-old House page and trying to imply that the entire Republican congressional leadership was somehow to blame for it. So the Washington Times picked up its Spiderman lunchbox and went running after them shouting "me too, me too" and trying to one up the Democrats by actually calling on Hastert to step down.

I will take a moment here to point out something very important which The Washington Times seems unable to grasp. There is a difference between email and instant messaging. The emails which Foley sent to pages were innocuous. Copies of the emails were given to more than one left-wing newspaper in Florida who then looked them over and determined them to be completely uninteresting and did not even bother to write a story about them. It is logs of instant message conversations which Foley had with the page which are full of explicit sexual references and indicate that Foley is a sick puppy.

Hastert has denied seeing anything but the innocent emails and there is not one shred of evidence that he is not telling the truth. For The Washington Times to call for his resignation over this is not just inappropriate, but bizarre. As I have stated my first take on it was that they were attempting to play catch-up with the Democrats.

However I just saw Ann Coulter on O'Riley and she had another take on the issue and I think that she might be correct.

Ann believes that The Washington Times is engaging in an hysterical over reaction in order to show how unlike the Democrats that they are.

It makes sense. Democrats have a history of defending their own when caught in similar circumstances. When Barney Frank was caught running a homosexual prostitution ring out of his apartment his reaction was to say, "I didn't know anything about it" and the Democrat Party and its propaganda organs (otherwise known as the mainstream media) said, "Oh, Ok" and dropped the matter. It did not matter to them in the slightest that Frank's "boyfriend" said then and maintains to this very day that the whole thing was Frank's idea.

When a Democrat congressman was having a sexual affair with an underage female page he maintained that it was nobodies business and turned his back on the House when they passed a censure resolution, rejecting their judgment. He went on to be reelected several more times and left the House only when he chose to retire.

We can add to this the Democrat's defense of Bill Clinton, not just when he was found to be having an affair with a White House intern young enough to be his daughter but their defense of him when he was credibly accused of forcible rape.

Republicans are different than Democrats. We are the Party of faith, family values and patriotism. Of course there will be bad apples. No political party has the ability to purge the human soul of all traces of sin. However when we find a rotten apple we deal with it. Foley is out of the House of Representatives and will never be back. This sets us apart from the other party and this is all to the good.

However it is possible to go too far. Speaker Hastert is being asked to step down because didn't act on knowledge that he didn't possess. This is obviously not reasonable and should not be allowed to stand.