What if Karl Rove outed Mark Foley (to Cover his Own Political Failure)?

[McCamy Taylor]

In a New Yorker article by Jeffrey Goldberg, Karl Rove blames the 2006 election loss by the GOP on Mark Foley.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/06/04/070604fa_fact_goldberg?printable=true

Rove places the blame for the election results on the recent scandals in Congress—congressmen who placed themselves in the orbit of Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist at the center of the Republican ethics meltdown; and the former congressman Mark Foley’s relationships with congressional pages—rather than the Administration’s management of the Iraq war. “If you look at the exit polling, the No. 1 issue, particularly among swing voters, was corruption and behavior,” he said. “After Foley, people said, ‘It’s just too much.’ After that, spending was the No. 2 issue.”

Foley provides a convenient way to dodge the blame for his own mistakes. And Karl Rove has made many mistakes. The Iraq War was ill conceived and poorly waged and growing ever more unpopular by the day. Selection 2004 was so blatantly riddled with Republican election fraud---which Gonzales' Department of Justice had not investigated---that voters were chomping at the bit to get to the polls again and set things right. In 2006, Rove's main election strategy was to use Terra as a way to influence the electorate. However, the mainstream media lockdown which had enabled Bush to sell America the war with Iraq had been broken when Michael Powell revealed that the administration had no intention of honoring its pledge to relax federal media ownership rules. A change of leadership at NBC, the Judy Miller scandal at the NYT and then Katrina also helped to tear apart the MSM wall which Rove had worked so carefully to craft. When he started again with the Terra warnings in 2006--the Sears Catalogue Bombers, the Liquid Terra-ists--, the free press reported on the silliness of these warnings. As a result, people yawned or said "They are just trying to get us to vote Republican." There was no way for the US to step into the Israeli-Lebanese conflict as planned, with half of the press reporting negatively about Israel, which meant that Syria could not be drawn into a fight with the US, so there would be no pre-election showdown with Iran---

Karl Rove's attempts to model the 2006 Congressional elections on the 2002 Congressional elections were going nowhere. And then the NYT broke the NIE document story in September 2006, which revealed that the war in Iraq actually made the US less safe and more vulnerable to terror. That meant that the October surprise which Rove had been promising had to be put on moth balls. If Al Qaeda agents were to be caught crossing the Mexican border with a dirty bomb after the NIE documents were made public, the Democrats would have pointed their fingers at Bush and said "It is your fault."

In the light of all these political set backs, did Karl Rove's "the math" add up to numbers very different from those he admitted to in public? Despite the carefully planned voter supression by DOJ and E-vote fraud, did he know that the Republicans were likely to lose control of the House and Senate. and did he fear for his reputation? And, if so, did he decide to designate a scapegoat?

It has always puzzled me, why did ABC News break the story of the Mark Foley scandal? Just a few weeks before, Disney/ABC committed a journalistic atrocity, The Path to 9/11. I believe that Disney agreed to produce this piece of GOP election propoganda in exchange for the FCC recommending that the Republican Senate not pass the McCain/Stevens a la carte cable bill. Why, after Disney took so much heat for that awful show in order to win the favor of the Bush administration would it allow its news network to earn the antipathy of the Republican Party by reporting on a sex scandal involving a Republican Congressman?

Maybe, because someone in the administration told them to? The Bush administration and Karl Rove have no qualms about throwing anyone, even members of their own party under the bus if it is politically expedient. Mark Foley could have been offered to the press as 1. a temporary distraction to get them off the NIE document story and 2. a scapegoat for Karl Rove's failures should the election be lost as all signs were pointing that it would be.

We will never know. I offer this suggestion, because given the way that things work with the mainstream media, it is more likely that a big story like the Mark Foley story would break at ABC because someone in the White House wanted it to break than because someone at ABC suddenly decided to become fearless and patriotic. Also, there has been no administration payback aimed towards ABC for their "treachery", the way that there has been payback towards CBS for some of their stories (like the one done about Abu Ghraib) and NBC.

[Bitwit1234]

1. Well=========

If the republicans had not been crooks; had not done crooked things and gotten caught; there wouldn't have been anything that the public could fixate on. And voted against them now would they. So it was the REPUBLICANS OWN DARN FAULT FOR BEING CROOKS IN THE FIRST PLACE.

[Writer]

2. OMG Karl Rove really IS an idiot.

I cannot believe anyone ever considered that man a political genius. He is none of that. I actually agree with Gingrich for the first time in my life.

Karl Rove = the Architect... of the GOP's downfall.

[Orangepeel]

3. We do know. A blogger named Lane Hudson outed Mark Foley

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lane_Hudson

A lifelong Democrat, Hudson was born in Darlington, SC and grew up in neighboring Hartsville. After high school in Myrtle Beach, he moved to Charleston, South Carolina and attended the College of Charleston. He worked for a number of political campaigns including that of John Kerry. In 1995, he met Mark Foley at a Capitol Hill bar, where Foley attempted to pick him up.<1>

Stop Sex Predators

In July 2006, Hudson anonymously launched a blog called "Stop Sex Predators." His intention, as he stated on his blog, was "to serve as a clearing house for the public to report sex predators and as a resource for concerned parents and citizens."<2> Beginning in August, he started posting about Congressmen rumored to have sex affairs with congressional pages, and solicited tips and e-mails.<3> On 24 September 2006 he posted photocopied e-mails from Mark Foley to a 16-year-old page.<4> The political blog Wonkette expressed skepticism about Hudson's post,<5> and users of the website Daily Kos suspected the post to be a hoax,<6> but on September 28, ABC News' Brian Ross confirmed the existence of the e-mails,<7> which he had received in August but not previously reported on.<8>

When Hudson's identity was revealed, he was fired from his job at Human Rights Campaign.<9> Hudson joked that despite the fact that he simply told the truth, he was the only person in Washington fired over Mark Foley's exploits.<1> Stop Sex Predators ceased updates after Hudson was fired.

[McCamy Taylor]

4. He may have outed Foley, but someone gave ABC permission to run with the story.

A whole lot of GOP Congressmen also knew (and had known for years) that Foley was a sexual predator, but the story never appeared on ABC News---until Rove needed a political distraction from the NIE story that was making it impossible for him to use any Terra related political campaign dirty tricks. I have been thinking about it, and Foley might have been thrown under the bus as a temporary distraction that got way out of hand.

Lighting one fire to hide a much more damaging political scandal is a trick that both Poppy and Rove have used time after time. It is almost a trademark of the Bush clan. I have lost track of how many "friends" have been sacrificed for a momentary news distraction. Often it is a minority or a gay or someone who is at the fringes of the Bush Cabal. No one that they would really miss. For instance, I have long suspected that the African-american journalist who took pay-offs from the Bush administration to write stories favorable to them who got outed in the winter of 2004-5 was outed by Rove in order to distract the press from Selection 2004 Ohio. No one every explained WHO outed him. All we saw was that the press turned their attention en masse to attacking one of their own, and it bought the WH some much needed breathing space until Tsunami hit.

The beauty of creating one relatively minor scandal that appears to damage a Bush associate or taint the Bush clan in order to distract from a much worse Bush scandal is that people will not exclaim "that is the politics of distraction!" But it is still is.

[Orangepeel]

5. Well, I don't know anything about Armstrong Williams

(I believe that is the writer to whom you refer), but I don't for a minute believe that Rove meant for Foley to be outed. First, I don't believe that he is so smart to be behind everything that people give him credit for, and second, I don't believe he is so stupid as to purposely create a gay, child sex scandal. Nothing is more likely to catch the public's attention in a negative way.

Some of our problems as a party stem from people on the inside of media organizations pulling strings against us, but not all of it does. Much of it stems from what has been our inability to turn minor stories into major ones. The right has had Drudge for a while and talk radio for decades. These non-journalists fan the flames on nonstories until legitimate journalists feel pressured to pick them up. We haven't had the same behind the scenes infrastructure because left leaning journalists tend to behave more professionally (the brass at media corporations may be able to kill some stories, but not very many -- there would be a lot more left leaning journalists complaining).

Lane Hudson collected evidence and made it public. He worked hard and Wonkette picked it up. That made it news enough for ABC run it. Believe what you want, of course, but this one is simple.