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Take That Moral High Ground!

Wait a minute. Isn’t everybody going haywire in here? There seems to be a wild misapprehension about the mechanics and structure of the House of Representatives. Was Denny Hastert Mark Foley’s boss? No. Foley’s boss, as it were, was the collective electorate of his district. I know this is a political game now, and politics […]

Wait a minute. Isn’t everybody going haywire in here? There seems to be a wild misapprehension about the mechanics and structure of the House of Representatives. Was Denny Hastert Mark Foley’s boss? No. Foley’s boss, as it were, was the collective electorate of his district. I know this is a political game now, and politics ain’t beanbag, but it really makes little sense that Hastert and other Republican House officials are somehow being held responsible for Foley’s behavior, as though it occurred on their “watch.” Foley wasn’t theirs to “watch.” They saw or heard about a few e-mails that seemed peculiar, somebody told Foley to knock it off, and that was as much as it was in their power, or it was their legal or moral or political responsibility, to do. ~John Podhoretz

It is technically true that Foley does not “work for” Hastert and Hastert is not his “boss,” and so, very technically, the Speaker has no official responsibility to keep an eye on the perversions of Members (he might be swamped with work if he took this job on all the time), but that is not what we’re talking about.  We’re talking about negligent leadership, which, as it happened, enabled a sexual predator to keep abusing his position in Congress to have access to boys.  The Speaker is responsible for the reputation of the House, and here he was clearly either MIA or complicit.  There are not really any good reasons for Hastert’s failure–and it is a failure.  Leaders head off these problems before they reach this point.  If they are responsible, they don’t kick the can down the road or, when cornered by revelations of their failure, feign memory loss (that means you, Hastert).  Even if you don’t think that Hastert, Boehner and Reynolds et al. were actively covering up something they knew to be wrong (quite an assumption), you have to acknowledge that they used poor judgement and failed as leaders.  Why would Republicans want to be led by men who bungled something this obviously sensitive and explosive?  Oh, that’s right, this is a party that excels in excusing incompetent leadership in the name of loyalty and “staying on message.” 

Let’s also note that the less explicit emails were more than “peculiar”–they were bizarre and said, without needing to read too much into it, “I’m an older man who really likes teenage boys.”  If Foley’s predilections for pages were indeed an open secret among the House pages, who really believes that they were a mystery to his colleagues and the leadership? 

Brookhiser has a better take:

[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.

As a result, Foley stayed put, with predictable consequences for other pages and himself, and the boat will now sink, unless Hastert leaves the helm.

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