The Dish

Here’s the money ‘graph from his statement:

The fact is, even prior to the existence of the Foley e-mail exchanges, I had more than one conversation with senior staff at the highest level of the House of Representatives asking them to intervene when I was informed of Mr. Foley’s inappropriate behavior. One of these staffers is still employed by a senior House Republican leader. Rather than trying to shift the blame on me, those who are employed by these House leaders should acknowledge what they know about their action or inaction in response to the information they knew about Mr. Foley prior to 2005.

So Fordham claims there is one actual individual still working for a "senior House Republican leader" who knew before 2005 about Foley’s problem. Others may have known but are not now in the House leadership. That seems to me to suggest that Fordham didn’t tell Hastert directly but had every reason to believe he’d done his duty in notifying Hastert’s office. At least that seems the most Hastert-friendly glimmer to be found here.

Hastert’s office responds to Kirk Fordham’s assertion that he notified "senior staff at the highest level of the House of Representatives" two years ago of Mark Foley’s problem and asked them to do something about it. Here’s their response: "That never happened." I note that Fordham did not say he told Hastert personally. It’s possible Hastert wasn’t warned. But Fordham insists someone very high up was. I guess we’ll find out more soon. I also note that Fordham is openly gay. And like every openly gay man I know, seems creeped out by Foley’s conduct.

John Yoo, torture advocate, architect of the Bush administration’s detention policies, was on NPR today. He’s a chilling individual. I recommend listening to his defense of the right of the executive to detain anyone without charges and torture them at will. The readers’ comments give me hope.

A reader writes:

I just watched your opening speech without taking notes – but in case you’d think it a useful measure of how well you hit your targets, this is how I’d sum it up in a few words:

1) Doubt is the essence of conservatism because, man being born to err, any certainty whatsoever has a chance of being error, and error enshrined in power is dangerous; therefore what conservatism "conserves" is a bulwark against, an escape route from, and an impediment in the path of, all certainty.

2) The distinctive embodiment of conservative doubt in the American constitution consists chiefly in its dispersal and balancing of power, and not in any positive assertion of a particular good, truth or virtue.  The assumption is that any one branch, state, party, or office-holder is likely at one time or another either to fall into an erroneous certainty, or to betray such ideas of good and virtue as might be shared, and that therefore the essential function of constitutional government is to allow any of its constituent parts to be frustrated, to let none be sure of prevailing, and yet to guarantee to each the possibility of fighting again another day after a lost skirmish.

3)  The problem of fundamentalism is that it ascribes the moral powers and rights of absolute truth to certainties that cannot rightly be so regarded, that are instead likely (as all certainties are) to include error, and that grow in their potential for harm in proportion to the degree that they are not examined by a skeptical, doubting conscience.  From this contradiction between the valorization of certainty and the valorization of doubt springs an inherent enmity between fundamentalism and conservatism.

Did I get that right?

Too right. You should write a book. But if you want to read one that makes this case as carefully as I could, you know where to find it. The official launch date is next Tuesday, but you can pre-order on Amazon now.

It may have been unwise for the House leadership to get Kirk Fordham to take the fall on the Foley matter. He’s now unloading to the press:

Kirk Fordham told The Associated Press that when he was told about Foley’s inappropriate behavior toward pages, he had "more than one conversation with senior staff at the highest level of the House of Representatives asking them to intervene."

The conversations took place long before the e-mail scandal broke, Fordham said, and at least a year earlier than members of the House GOP leadership have acknowledged…

The longtime Capitol Hill aide said he would fully disclose to the FBI and the House ethics committee "any and all meetings and phone calls" regarding Foley’s behavior that he had with senior staffers in the House leadership.

"The fact is even prior to the existence of the Foley e-mail exchanges I had more than one conversation with senior staff at the highest level of the House of Representatives asking them to intervene when I was informed of Mr. Foley’s inappropriate behavior," Fordham said.

Senior staff at the highest level of the House? In 2004? Asking them to intervene? Who?

A reader is impressed by the dignified way in which the Amish community has dealt with the terrible toll of recent days:

The thing that has struck me about the Amish, is how truly Christian they are … they will not be photographed or interviewed because is it too vain.  We won’t see any Amish on CNN, Oprah or the like because they believe in humility and privacy.  They have thanked the police and firefighters who helped their community.  They have expressed forgiveness to the murderer and have also expressed sympathy towards his wife and children.  They have noted how difficult it will be for their and the murderer’s children to go back to school. This tragedy has deeply affected me.  But, I have come away with a sense that the Amish have shown us all an example of how Christ would behave … with dignity, forgiveness and love. They are a real Christian community.    

From what I’ve seen, I couldn’t agree more. And what a contrast with some of the preening charlatans and scolds among the power-obsessed Christianists who now dominate the GOP. Here is the power of the Jesus I believe in:

A grieving grandfather told young relatives not to hate the gunman who killed five girls in an Amish schoolhouse massacre, a pastor said on Wednesday. "As we were standing next to the body of this 13-year-old girl, the grandfather was tutoring the young boys, he was making a point, just saying to the family, ‘We must not think evil of this man,’" the Rev. Robert Schenck told CNN. "It was one of the most touching things I have seen in 25 years of Christian ministry."

Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. How easy to say. How hard to practise. When people actually practise what Jesus preached, it still shocks, doesn’t it? And Jesus’ teaching is nothing if not shocking.

"The fundamental problem congressional Republicans are experiencing now is that they have almost no moral capital left after the last two years. Again and again, when given the choice to reform their practices or do little or nothing, they always picked the latter. On travel, on Abramoff, on earmarking — you name it. The impression they always gave was that the integrity of the institution and the public interest had to take a back-seat to their own convenience.

They wanted to squeak by this year on gerrymandering, negative ads, and money, and just might have succeeded‚Äîhad nothing more gone wrong. Well, now it has and people feel confirmed in what they always suspected about this Congress‚Äîthat it is unable to police its own practices and is full of people who don’t follow the same rules as the rest of us. This is deadly. So, in one sense, the best way to have coped with the fall-out of the Foley scandal would have been long before the Foley scandal ever broke, when all the other scandals were breaking. Then, congressional Republicans would have had some reserve of credibility to fall back on. Now they have very little," – Rich Lowry, National Review Online.

(Photo: Lauren Victoria Burke/AP.)

The Washington Blade’s Kevin Naff editorializes about Mark Foley – and throws a side-shot at yours truly.

A reader writes:

Gay men belong in the closet. It is better for gay men, and it is better for the rest of us.

You are as good an example of this as I can find. The sexual behavior of gay men is a threat to the public health, as the AIDS epidemic made clear. I’m not about to pretend that gay men behave sexually as straights do.

The old paradigm of living in the closet and marriage to a fag hag is better for gay men, and it is better for the rest of us, too. Relationship to a woman is the only way to constrain the sexual behavior of men. The sexual behavior of gay men must be constrained.

There is no civil rights issue involved in any of this. You are seriously deceiving yourself. You’re just a spoiled child living in a society in which the men have collapsed and can no longer assert their authority.

This will change in the future. No society can continue to survive with gay men living without constraint. And, no society can long endure under the authority of the fag hags. The world of the fags and the fag hags is disgusting. There is something called reality.

I don’t think we should throw men in jail for f***ing each other in the ass. But, we certainly shouldn’t encourage it either. We should push you and your like back into the closet where you belong. Hope it happens soon.

Ah yes, getting gay men to marry women. That helps. Ask Jim McGreevey – and the countless black women who have gotten AIDS because their gay husbands can’t deal honestly with their sexual orientation. As for the personal attack, sure I have HIV. And, sure, I’ve had my share of sex. I don’t begrudge that to anyone, gay or straight. But I’m also an example of someone who was eventually lucky enough or persistent enough to find love and to get engaged. I’ve never been so happy in my private life. There are times when I think I’ve become a victim of my own arguments. And I’m glad of it. And if you think you will succeed in taking these opportunities and freedoms away from us, think again. We’re going nowhere. We fought for these freedoms, generation by generation, over the ashes of hundreds of thousands of our loved ones. Retreat is not an option.