Text 2910, 109 rader
Skriven 2006-10-20 20:01:18 av Alan Hess
Ärende: Foley, Studds, Crane
============================
Studds wasn't the only person messing with pages at the time.  Remember
Republican Dan Crane?  He's mentioned in this column re the reaction to
Foleygate.

*****

washingtonpost.com


Folier Than Thou

By Michael Kinsley
Friday, October 20, 2006; A21

Here in Washington, we're all competing to see who can be more po-faced about
Mark Foley and the congressional pages. Who can deplore Foley's behavior the
most?

Democrats, sensing a deeply wounded Republican Party, are going in for the
kill. It's the final evidence that the GOP is terminally corrupt: A congressman
was cyber-molesting teenage boys and his party leaders evidently didn't even
care.

Republicans answer: Hey, we invented child molesting! As an issue, that is. We
own family values, and we're not about to let the party of Monica Lewinsky and
Heather Has Two Mommies outflank us on the sexual morality front.

And then there are gay voices, eager to remind people that being gay and
molesting children are two different things, which of course they are. But just
to make the point clear, gays want everyone to know that they defer to no one
in their distaste for Foley's behavior.

So everyone claims to be terribly distressed. We glare at each other, looking
as grim as possible, and the first one to break into a grin or a smirk or a
snort loses. Stop it! It's not funny!

But then who are all the people watching David Letterman and Jay Leno, Jon
Stewart and Stephen Colbert, and laughing -- laughing! -- at Foley's
shenanigans? Who are the people cracking jokes on the Internet? They are so
distressed that they can't stop giggling, and they find the whole subject so
distasteful that they can't get enough of it. This is not a traditional case of
politicians' hypocrisy. This is politicians accommodating the hypocrisy of
voters.

Perhaps it would be a better world if everybody were as disgusted by the Foley
episode as almost everybody claims to be. But the truth is that most people are
enjoying this story and can't get enough of it. If you gave them the secret
power to wish the whole thing away, they'd say, "Are you nuts? This is
terrific!"

Poor Dennis Hastert is suspected, probably falsely, of being willing to
sacrifice a child for the good of his party, and now the other party reaps the
benefit. Do you think that if the devil told Nancy Pelosi she could undo the
scandal, save these 17-year-olds from the trauma of electronic messages from a
sicko congressman and give up her hopes of being speaker, that she would find
such an offer tempting? I don't. And I don't think Pelosi is callous or cruel.
If she thought it through, she might conclude that the good that can come from
a Democratic Congress exceeds the evil that a few randy messages may have done
to a few teenage pages. Meanwhile, most Americans, I strongly suspect, would
happily sacrifice a few more pages just to keep the story going for
entertainment purposes.

Then there is Gerry Studds (who, by a weird coincidence, died last week).
Studds was a Democratic congressman who, in 1983, was censured for having an
actual physical affair with a congressional page 10 years before that. After
his censure, he continued to run in his district (in Massachusetts, natch), to
win and to serve in Congress until 1997.

Compare and contrast Mark Foley: It develops that he may have had physical
something-or-other with a page after all. But even before this came out, he had
resigned under pressure on the basis of those e-mails alone. Doesn't that prove
that Republicans are more serious about Protecting Our Children than Democrats
are? Don't they win the po-face contest?

The Studds case is troubling. Do the Republicans have a point? Maybe, but there
are a few points in mitigation as well. One is the huge random element in what
becomes a Washington scandal. You don't need ideological conspiracies or grand
cultural tectonic shifts. Whether something becomes a scandal depends on how
close we are to an election, on what else is in the news, on what Michael
Isikoff had for lunch and so on.

The Studds case came paired with that of Republican congressman Dan Crane, who
had an affair with a female page. In a mutual disarmament agreement, both
miscreants were "censured," which was actually a ratchet up from "reprimanded"
or "scolded" or "tickled" or some other term recommended by an outside
committee. Speaker Hastert says that if Foley hadn't resigned immediately, he
would have been bounced. Maybe. But Crane, like Studds, was renominated by his
party in the 1984 election. That would be the Republican Party. (Unlike Studds,
Crane lost.)

Back in 1983 Studds took the position that the page had been over the age of
consent in the District of Columbia, which is 16, and consent for the affair
had, in fact, been mutual. This, of course, left out the question whether, as a
member of Congress, he had some special duty to protect even 17-year-old
congressional pages from middle-aged men such as himself. He probably did have
such a duty, though he never paraded around as a protector of children, as
Foley did.

A final difference between Studds and Foley is that the Foley case exposed the
tawdry mechanics of a congressman trolling for action among teenage pages. No
doubt the Studds affair involved the pre-e-mail equivalent of these mechanics,
but they never became public. Obviously, that doesn't excuse Studds. But it
also does not establish anything superior about Republican moral values.

kinsleym@washpost.com
+ 2006 The Washington Post Company

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