Category: The Dish

It turns out that there is an actual case of actual pedophilia in this country that merits some attention. Money quote from CNN:

Pennsylvania schoolhouse killer Charles Carl Roberts IV told his wife he molested young relatives 20 years ago and was dreaming about molesting children again, police said Tuesday.

Investigators talked to relatives and analyzed suicide notes as they tried to determine what made Roberts barricade himself inside the tiny Amish school, tying up girls and shooting them – five fatally – before killing himself Monday.

Pennsylvania State Police Commissioner Jeffrey Miller said Roberts may have targeted the school for its girl students and – given various items found in the school – intended to molest the children. Roberts brought KY Jelly lubricant to the schoolhouse where the assault occurred, but there is no evidence that the victims were sexually assaulted in any way, Miller said.

"It’s very possible that he intended to victimize these children in many ways prior to executing them and killing himself," Miller said.

Here we have a case far graver than the Foley scandal, in which little girls had their legs bound and were shot in the head. The trauma of the event for the survivors must be unbearable and unending. It happened in a quiet corner of rural America. And yet it barely got airtime. Because it won’t have any effect on the November elections. Which is an indictment of all of us.

Dick Cheney gets a critic of his arrested for daring to challenge the vice-monarch in public. It doesn’t surprise me. But it does disturb me that a man like this now has the power to detain anyone in this country at will, designate them an "enemy combatant," and jail them indefinitely.

NRO’s The Corner is worth wading through if only for Rick Brookhiser. This will probably make him less popular among NRO-niks but I’m almost always enlightened, educated and impressed by his writing. Anyway, he seems to me to grasp the issue of Hastert. It’s not so much a horrifying cover-up as simple bad management:

Hastert bungled this sky-high, through psychological naivete in the service of wanting to avoid a problem. Telling Foley to go and sin no more was like telling a drunk to go and drink no more. It’s easy to think like that when you don’t want to rock the boat.

Not a capital crime, just misjudgment. A reader makes the case more expansively here::

I think Hewitt misses the reason that Hastert may be in trouble.

When I first read the e-mails, they seemed creepy because they came from an adult to an unrelated minor with whom the adult had not extensively worked (and one was about one of the pages); it’s not accurate to say that they were creepy only because Foley was gay and because the page in question was male. But I entirely agree that they weren’t "strong" enough to justify formal action.

The problem for Hastert is that there is a stage in these incidents short of taking formal action – when you realize (or should realize) that a particular member of Congress has a "problem". That is, based on the e-mails and on the apparent reputation that should have been known by those supervising the pages, Foley appeared to be someone who not only was attracted to pages, but also was not willing to maintain the proper personal distance between himself and the objects of that attraction.  This is exactly the scenario that would exist if the member was heterosexual and the page was of the opposite sex, or for that matter, if a member had a bad temper and had a tendency to verbally abuse the pages, or if a member had a drinking problem that led him to engage in embarrassing public misbehavior.

It’s basic management:  Realizing that you have a problem supervisor, figuring out the extent of the problem and addressing that problem. It doesn’t look like Hastert did it; if he had, he might have realized that even if he couldn’t "prove" that Foley had violated any law or rule, he was someone, at the very least, who should be discouraged from seeking re-election because he was a potential embarrassment to the party and to the Congress. At the very least, he should have spoken with Foley about the situation and made it clear that someone else was better suited to represent Republicans in Foley’s district. It was Hastert – not ABC or the newspapers – who had an obligation to make sure that Republicans in Foley’s district weren’t nominating someone who might embarrass them.

If I was a member of Hastert’s caucus, I’d have serious doubts about his management ability. And that’s reason enough to get a different speaker, regardless of whether it gives a "victory" to the other side. The failure to hold Hastert responsible for his failure lends credence to the theory that the current GOP majority is suffering from an arrogance of power and needs to be brought down.

A reader writes:

Interesting topic, fundamentalism as addiction. I would disagree slightly. Rather than seeing fundamentalism as an addiction, I would say that fundamentalism and addiction are parallel responses to the same underlying phenomenon: a deep insecurity and emotional woundedness. People who are addicted (whether to tobacco, drugs, alcohol, food, sex, etc.) often report that they are attempting to fill an emotional hole or void in their being. Fundamentalism may be another response to the same thing.

… well, weirder. I think I’d rather think about Iraq.

""Where’s the leader?" Bush, according to Woodward, has exclaimed in dismay about the Iraqi government’s dithering. "Where’s George Washington? Where’s Thomas Jefferson? Where’s John Adams, for crying out loud?" For a president to ask that question about Iraq, that tribal stew, is enough to cause one to ask it about the United States," – George F. Will, in today’s Washington Post.

Time for a little light Foleygate relief. You like movies about gladiators?

The real power-brokers in the GOP are now weighing in. Money quote from a press release I just received from Focus on the Family:

Those truly interested in protecting children from online predators should spend less time calling for Speaker Hastert to step down, and more time demanding that the Justice Department enforce existing laws that would limit the proliferation of the kind of filth that leads grown men to think it’s perfectly OK to send lurid e-mails to 16-year-old boys.

The right message, I think, from the Human Rights Campaign, the largest lobbying group for gay equality:

"Gay or straight, Democrat or Republican, it is completely inexcusable for an adult to have this kind of communication with a minor. Congressman Foley brought shame on himself and this Congress by his horrible behavior and complete lack of judgment. We strongly condemn his behavior."

The only problem with it is that technically, these teens were not legally minors in the District of Columbia, with respect to the age of sexual consent. I hate to insist on this point, and I don’t mean to excuse the interactions. But accusations of pedophilia as such – clinically or legally – are unfounded; and we need to be clear about the offense. This is about abuse of power with impressionable and vulnerable young people and immense, astounding hypocrisy. It would be the same offense if the victims were female and the congressman heterosexual. And it’s inexcusable.

A Bostonian responds to the Foley affair. (Re-posted with fixed link.)