North Star Writers Group

Washington D.C. is all atwitter over the latest scandal-du-jour, that of Congressman Mark Foley (R-FL) having sent explicit Instant Messages to a 16-year-old male page. So far, there is zero evidence that any relationship actually occurred, with this page or any other on Foley's part. In spite of Foley immediately resigning, and the GOP leadership vowing an investigation, the Democrats have gone into their usual disingenuous moral outrage routine and called for everyone's heads to roll. Never mind the Democrat roster of shame, a mere portion of which tallies up as follows:

• Bill Clinton (had Monica Lewinsky under his Oval Office desk while married, perjured himself, suborned perjury from others, obstructed justice)

• Ted Kennedy (caused the death of Mary Jo Kopechne by letting her drown at Chappaquiddick while married)

• Gerry Studds (gay sex with a 17-year-old page, for which he turned his back on Congress when they censured him)

• Barney Frank (gay partner ran a prostitution ring from his Capitol Hill apartment)

• Gary Condit (married congressman had affair with intern Chandra Levy, who went missing and later turned up dead)

• Jim McGreevey (married New Jersey governor had gay affair, and put his lover on the state payroll in a high-level security position after 9/11 for which he wasn't qualified)

• Alcee Hastings (convicted of bribery and perjury as a judge)

And what do all of the above have in common? They were protected to the max by the Democrat leadership! Every one of these scoundrels had the partisan liberal wagons circled around them for the sake of saving power, and none of them gave the slightest thought to resignation. To hell with what they had done, whom they had victimized, whom they had cheated on and justice. All that was put aside for the sake of retaining partisan power. The Senate jury-nullified Clinton out of removal from office following impeachment, Kennedy still sits in that body, Studds was re-elected five times, Frank is still in the House (and in line for a committee chairmanship) and so is Hastings (elected after conviction). Only Condit and McGreevey are gone, and they weren't likely to win re-election in any event.

And the Democrats have the unmitigated gall to start chucking rocks from their glass house? At least the GOP kicks its own out when they're busted. (See Richard Nixon, for starters.) And they don't calculate how best to use information for partisan advantage when they come across it, whereas everything is electoral fodder to Democrats. Don't believe me? A few more facts from the Foley scandal:

• The editorial staffs of the Miami Herald and St. Petersburg Times first knew about the Instant Messages some three to four months ago. Yet they didn't run them until days after the deadline for being able to replace Foley on this November's ballot has passed. Gee, I wonder why? (And can we please finally accept the truth that the mainstream media is the Democratic National Committee’s propaganda machine?)

• Who gave the information to the newspaper editors? And why didn't they make it public immediately? Could they have been waiting until just before the election to do maximum damage to the GOP? (Never mind the 16-year-old page they put at risk of Foley's continued unwanted advances.)

• Until the past week, GOP leadership only had in their possession far more innocuous e-mails sent by Foley prior to the IMs. They did not have the later IMs that were far more explicit and damning. Also, the 16-year-old's parents asked the GOP leadership to keep it quiet to protect their son's privacy. Had the GOP initiated any investigation of a gay congressman over those communications alone, and against the victim's parents' explicit request to the contrary, you can bet your last dollar the Democrats would have been tripping over each other in a race to the TV cameras to be the first and loudest to scream "Homophobia! Homophobia! GOP bigotry!" and sign up the parents to cry on every talk show that could be booked. So, no matter what the GOP did, the Democrats were going to disingenuously and hypocritically be "outraged" over it.

Yet the spin is that the GOP leadership knew everything and sat on it. In fact, given the above, it is much more likely the Democrats and their liberal media allies knew and waited until the time was right to inflict the maximum electoral damage by releasing the story. And if the GOP had found out and acted on their own in the meantime, then the Democrats would've simply screamed homophobia and that it was only communications, not an actual affair, saving the distraught parents ("the Republicans broke their word!") as an ace up their sleeve.

All this from the party that clearly has no problem whatsoever with sex scandals involving much younger paramours, be they straight or gay, or even if the young victims turn up dead. (Heck, for Democrats, this sort of thing is like a fraternity initiation ritual; you're not truly a member of the club until you've done it.) If the GOP leadership really wants to investigate this, let's find out everyone who knew of this and did nothing. I'll guarantee you that you'll find as many or more Democrat and media bigwigs on the list than Republicans.

And no matter how this turns out, until such time as they fumigate and sterilize their own skeleton-filled closets, the utterly disingenuous and hypocritical Democrats need to shut up. I'll leave it to you, the reader, to determine for yourself what it means that when faced with this information, the Democrats could only think of how to use it for electoral gain while the GOP honored the parents' wishes and acted to the maximum extent they safely could, while Foley himself resigned.

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