http://www.harpers.org/sb-republicans-1160492797.htmlRepublicans Want to Turn Over a New Page
The Foley scandal is no “October Surprise”
Posted on Tuesday, October 10, 2006. By Ken Silverstein.
Leading Republicans, with the support of conservative media outlets, are charging that the Mark Foley scandal was a plot orchestrated by Democrats to damage the G.O.P.'s electoral prospects this November. According to the Washington Post, House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert appeared on Rush Limbaugh's radio show and “agreed when the host said the Foley story was driven by Democrats ‘in some sort of cooperation with some in the media’ to suppress turnout of conservative voters” before the midterm elections.
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The Republican leadership is lying when they claim that Democrats have engineered an “October Surprise”; there was never a plan undermine the G.O.P. or to destroy Hastert personally, as the speaker has vaingloriously suggested. I know this with absolute certainty because Harper’s was offered the story almost five months ago and decided, after much debate, not to run it here on Washington Babylon.
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It was a Democrat who brought me the emails, but comments he made and common sense strongly suggest they were originally leaked by a Republican office. And while it's entirely possible that Democratic officials became aware of the accusations against Foley, the source was not working in concert with the national Democratic Party. This person was genuinely disgusted by Foley's behavior, amazed that other publications had declined to publish stories about the emails, and concerned that Foley might still be seeking contact with pages.
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We decided against publishing the story because we didn't have absolute proof that Foley was, as one editor put it, “anything but creepy.” At the time I was disappointed that the story was killed—but I must confess that I was also a bit relieved because there had been the possibility, however unlikely, that I would wrongly accuse Foley of improper conduct.
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It is now absolutely clear that Foley was indeed a menace to kids working on Capitol Hill. In seeking to malign the parties who sought to expose his conduct, top Republicans reveal that they are far more outraged by the possibility that the scandal might harm their party’s prospects in November than they are by Foley's behavior.
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