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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alan Smithee who wrote (12733)	10/5/2006 9:04:20 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Respond to of 71588

With their troops at the edge of the cliff, some conservatives want to jump before the election. Thursday, October 5, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT Now that Mark Foley's carcass has gone over the side, the political waters are filling with sharks fighting over the remnants. We're going to find out how fast Denny Hastert can swim. First to the site as always was House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Republican leaders "failed to protect the children in their trust," intoned Parson Pelosi, last seen on this issue voting to revoke the Boy Scouts' charter for its ban on gay scoutmasters. So exercised is Ms. Pelosi that she wants the GOP leadership "immediately questioned under oath" by the Ethics Committee. One can hardly blame the Minority Leader for diving toward the jugular of a Republican Party already on its knees and on the brink of losing control of the House. More difficult to explain are the cultural conservatives and others on the political right swimming alongside Ms. Pelosi. The call for Mr. Hastert's head by the editorialists at the Washington Times has by now been prominently featured by the same media who usually dismiss them as conservative cranks. They were suddenly joined in the mainstream spotlight by Richard Viguerie--he once claimed Ronald Reagan was insufficiently conservative--who also called for the resignation of any House "enablers who made it possible." A statement on behalf of the executive committee of the family-coalition Arlington Group, including cultural conservative leaders Don Wildmon, Tony Perkins, Gary Bauer and Paul Weyrich, wants the "whole truth," which apparently consists of "when House Leadership or other members from either party knew of this situation." The group demands that "legal authorities prosecute any person who had knowledge of any such activity but did not report it immediately." And of course while the House Speaker was taking this public beating, his No. 2, Majority Leader John Boehner, pulled down the shades and turned away with his now-famous dismissal: "It's in his corner; it's his responsibility." And so with an election weeks away and its troops already at the edge of the cliff, the Republican elites decided to jump into the sea over Mr. Foley. We doubt that Messrs. Boehner, Wildmon, Perkins, Bauer and Weyrich will feel as politically cleansed as they seem to be this week if they wake up November 8 to a House run by Ms. Pelosi and Messrs. Rangel, Murtha, Dingell, Waxman, Obey and Frank. And if the pundits are right, the Foley wilding may even give them a Harry Reid Senate. Certainly there are plenty of reasons for the right to be upset with this Congress. As these columns described Monday in "The GOP Record," the flops of the party now in control of Congress have been significant: Taxes, health care, Social Security, immigration, earmarks, Abramoff. All this is enough to bring the charge that Speaker Hastert has been an absentee landlord. But if it's enough to justify his removal--and it may well be--the time for doing so is after the election, win or lose. We are hard put to see what these conservatives think will be gained by burning down the entire coalition before the election over Mark Foley. What is Mr. Hastert's supposed firing offense, anyway? We've seen no evidence to date that he lied or attempted a cover-up. His office responded to complaints from the parents of a former page by having the head of the page board and clerk of the House speak with Mr. Foley and order him to stop communicating with the minor. Republicans should also have alerted the Democrat on the page board to the warning, but to force a Speaker's resignation because he didn't demand an investigation into every communication between Mr. Foley and current and former pages is politically convenient hindsight. Two newspapers also saw the same emails and declined to publish a story on them, no doubt for similar reasons of privacy and fairness. On current course, the Hastert-must-resign conservatives are likely to wash away even the moral victory of the past week. Discounting for political calculation, prominent figures across the spectrum have repudiated and vilified Mr. Foley's behavior with minors. Melanie Sloan of the liberal Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington said lax oversight of Mr. Foley had left "a potential sexual predator on the loose." This sounds like a consensus standard. But it will be a minor footnote if the get-Denny posse enables a larger Democratic victory next month. Let's imagine, for instance, that a seat on the Supreme Court opens up next year with a Democratic House and GOP Senate majority called Lincoln Chafee. Approve another Alito? The diminished GOP Senate would be lucky if it got someone as conservative as Harriet Miers. Think Son of Souter. Want to choke down more gall? Try this: Making Mark Foley the fulcrum of defeat will let the spendthrift GOP appropriators off the hook. Reforming the earmark caucus was never going to be easy, but it'll be nigh impossible--in or out of power--if every political writer in America is describing how Republican elites pulled down the temple in 2006 over one Congressman's moral turpitude. It's possible cooler Republican heads have begun to notice that joining the Democrats' Foley bonfire makes no sense. On Tuesday, Mr. Boehner sent a letter to the Washington Times realigning himself with Speaker Hastert. Perhaps Republicans are regaining their political balance. We hope so. The war on terror, and Iraq, really are the largest issues in front of the American people. We need a clear reading on that in November, not on the personal ruin of Mark Foley. opinionjournal.com

To: Alan Smithee who wrote (12733)	10/6/2006 1:30:44 AM
From: RMF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71588

Like I said before, the age of consent is only 16 because if it were 18 or higher, they'd have to lock up a million teenage boys in this country every year. They should probably stipulate in every "age of consent law" the maximum age difference between the two participants. It could be that if the kid is between 16 and 18 the other party can be NO more than 5 years older. If a person is 21 or older and has no apparent mental defect, then they can sleep with a 100 year old for all I care.