Here’s the Point About Florida’s Mark Foley

Congressman Foley and his people are running around trying to find loopholes in US laws that will get Foley off the hook legally for having sex with teenagers. Foley is claiming he’s never had sex with a minor because he actually has sex with older teens. Foley’s focus is to stay out of jail. And although it would be nice to see this particular craven old Nance go to prison and experience predatory behavior for himself, making Mark Foley pay for his unconscionable behavior isn’t the highest priority right at this moment. For years Foley has ingratiated himself with teenage boys. For years he has put himself in positions of trust where he would have the closest possible contact with a group of boys he wanted to seduce. And for years, members of Congress have known what the unscrupulous rakehell was doing and they have let it go on. As a matter of law, it may make a difference whether the boys were 15 or 17, but as a matter of morals and ethics, it’s a distinction without a difference. What Foley was doing was cowardly, contemptible, obscene and foul. However, it may not have been illegal if he zeroed in on boys who had reached the age of consent. Nevertheless, there isn’t a single Senator or Representative in Congress who wouldn’t have wanted to inflict bodily harm on Mark Foley if they had found out he was trying to entice one of their teenage children into bed by sending them salacious emails. And whether their child was 15 or 17 would not have mattered. Mark Foley is a 52-year-old man. He preys on teenagers. And now, the pissant is saying he did it because he was drunk and because he was molested as a child. Ugh. Mark Foley becomes more repugnant as each day passes. But even Foley’s spineless justifications for targeting vulnerable young people aren’t the point. The point is that members of Congress knew what Foley was doing and they didn’t blow the whistle because they feared reprisals from Foley and they feared that if Foley’s predilection became public the Republican Party would lose power. The only measure the leaders of the Republican Party took to protect teenage boys in the Congressional Page Program was to warn the boys that Foley “was odd”. That’s the real point today. Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, Majority Leader John A. Boehner, Representative Rodney Alexander of Louisiana, Representative Thomas M. Reynolds of New York, all knew about Mark Foley’s nasty practice of singling out young pages to entice into sexual liaisons. And they did NOTHING to protect the pages. These men should be kicked out of Congress. Ugh. The Republican Party becomes more repugnant as each day passes.