Worse than Immoral

"C'est plus q'immorale, c'est une faute." ("It's worse than immoral, it's a mistake.")

So said Joseph Fouche after Napoleon had the royalist Duc D'Enghien shot. Some Republicans might be saying the same about the revelation that House Republican leaders were award of now-former Rep. Mark Foley's interest in teenage House pages in late 2005, but kept the matter hidden and allowed Foley to remain as chair of the Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children. (Scripps-Howard reports that Foley's proclivities were an open secret for years.)

Once again, the cover-up looks worse than the crime, if there is a crime. (A lot of people, including the White House, are calling for a criminal investigation.)

According to The New York Times, in late 2005, the clerk of the House and the chair of the committee that oversees pages spoke with Foley about the first batch of emails that have come to light--messages that the by-then former page and his family thought over-friendly. They did nothing more, however, and obviously Foley did not get the message.

What makes it worse for the Republicans is that House leaders have begun to fall out. Speaker Dennis Hastert denied that he had heard about the early batch of emails, but chair of the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, Thomas Reynolds (R. NY) says that he discussed them with Hastert in 2005. Reynolds himself is under attack for not having done enough to protect the pages.

The resignation of the formerly-popular Foley came on Friday, when it might have been buried over the weekend as the nation concentrates on football and gets ready for the Major League Baseball playoffs. But the story has spread like wildfire. Today, all the Sunday programs gave it air time. (Of course, as The Times noted. having the words, "sexually explicit" (as in the emails and instant messages that sealed Foley's fate), "male" and "page" in the ledes of the stories about Foley's resignation helped give the story legs.)

This may be the wishful thinking of an old cynic, but I wonder if the huge play this story is getting is a sign that we have reached a tipping point, that the American public may finally recognize the national Republican Party for the cesspool that it has become. Or perhaps it is Congress or government itself that is viewed as a cesspool. The outcome of the coming elections could be powerfully affected by which view predominates.