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As featured on p. 218 of "Bloggers on the Bus," under the name "a MyDD blogger."

Thursday, October 05, 2006

Masturgate Matters

So says the liberal elites over at Fox News. At least the continued presence of Jabba the Enabler matters:

House Republican candidates will suffer massive losses if House Speaker Dennis Hastert remains speaker until Election Day, according to internal polling data from a prominent GOP pollster, FOX News has learned.

"The data suggests Americans have bailed on the speaker," a Republican source briefed on the polling data told FOX News. "And the difference could be between a 20-seat loss and 50-seat loss." [...]

The GOP source told FOX News that the internal data had not been widely shared among Republican leaders, but as awareness of it spreads calculations about Hastert's tenure may change. The source described the pollster who did the survey as "authoritative," and said once the numbers are presented, it "could change the focus" on whether the speaker remains in power.

While internal GOP polls show trouble for Republicans, the newest AP/Ipsos poll also showed that half of likely voters say the Foley scandal will be "very or extremely important" when it comes time to vote on Nov. 7. By nearly a 2-1 ratio, voters say Democrats are better at combating corruption.


Meanwhile, individual representatives are cancelling their appearances with the Speaker. The leader of the Republicans in the House is being shunned. For some reason, he thinks that resigning would only hurt his party's chances in November, when the opposite is the case. In truth it's probably because he just wants to stay in power, and he's "fixing the facts around the policy," something Republicans are pretty good at doing.

One reason Masturgate matters is that Democrats can use it as a political cudgel to ward off attacks, and it's devastatingly effective:

Rep. Harold Ford (D-TN) seized on the cybersex scandal surrounding former Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) Wednesday to deflect a question about an NRSC ad which asks: "What kind of man parties with Playboy Playmates in lingerie then films a commercial in a church pew?"

"I'm not going to take a lecture on morality from a party that took hush money from a child predator," said Ford Wednesday in Memphis, TN after speaking to the downtown Kiwanis Club.


Ouch. Even if Hastert did resign, that would leave a mark. Democrats are frankly making hay of this the way Republicans would, and this time the dash of demagoguery is at least put toward a sincere outrage at a leadership that hid away a child predator.

On the WingNet, GOP defenders are trying to comfort themselves with Matt Drudge's Exclusive! Developing! that one set of IM messages was the result of an online prank by the pages gone awry. It's entirely possible that is true. But the fact that the page knew to do so is evidence, to me, that this goes back a number of years and was common knowledge among him and his colleagues. Would you just take a flyer and guess that a Congressman had a fetishistic involvement with young boys and that you could goad him into cybersex? Apparently the warnings on Foley were being distributed to pages as far back as 1995. His former chief of staff admitted he went to Hastert and senior leadership 3 years ago. This allegation does nothing but cement the fact that Foley had a problem for a long time, and it was studiously ignored by those in a position to fix it.

This line of attack by the Drudge crowd just encourages the drip, drip, drip of further allegations and makes the whole thing worse. For example:

Three more former congressional pages have come forward to reveal what they call "sexual approaches" over the Internet from former Congressman Mark Foley.

The pages served in the classes of 1998, 2000 and 2002. They independently approached ABC News after the Foley resignation through the Brian Ross & the Investigative Team's tip line on ABCNews.com. None wanted their names used because of the sensitive nature of the communications.

"I was seventeen years old and just returned to [my home state] when Foley began to e-mail me, asking if I had ever seen my page roommates naked and how big their penises were," said the page in the 2002 class.

The former page also said Foley told him that if he happened to be in Washington, D.C., he could stay at Foley's home if he "would engage in oral sex" with Foley. [...]

All three pages described similar instant message and e-mail patterns, with remarkably similar escalations of provocative questions.

"He didn't want to talk about politics," the page said. "He wanted to talk about sex or my penis," the page said.


In a way, the so-called "prank" corroborates the other tales. This was systematic and well-known among those being preyed upon; it was clearly known by House leadership. And Americans get this.

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