Foley Goes Into Rehab
It appears that everytime anybody gets in trouble these days, they go into rehab. Rep. Mark Foley is
doing the same thing, however, it's not like Mel Gibson got his DUI. (H/T to
Sharon Cobb on this one, who caught it over the night from
Drudge.)
Foley didn't commit a crime that had alcohol as its center and to me, it doesn't matter if he was bombed out of his skull when he sent the IM's to that intern.
He committed a crime where he was completely sexually inappropriate with a kid.
Pretty simple, actually.
When I used to work with battered women, I would hear the old standby from batterers "I was drunk."
This is my take. Being drunk just makes a person less inhibited to do what they wanted to do anyway or at least that's my experience having worked with battered and sexually abused women and children. The "I'm an alcoholic diatribe" just doesn't wash with me.
And although I lean left, I don't care that Foley is a republican. It wouldn't matter to me if he was a mugwamp, what he did was wrong.
ABC has a
copy of at least one of the transcripts if you want to see it.
It's pretty explicit.
To me, there is no doubt he is doing a sexual dance with an underage boy.
But here's the thing that hacks me off as much as anything, and I've already written about it. If the political leadership knew about this as early as 2001 and
WERE WARNING pages about
Foley, then why didn't they stop this sooner. It's a good question.
Matthew Loraditch, a page in the 2001-2002 class, told ABC News he and other pages were warned about Foley by a supervisor.
Loraditch, the president of the Page Alumni Association, said the pages were told "don't get too wrapped up in him being too nice to you and all that kind of stuff."
The political aspect I see is that once again politics is more important than children, and that's just plain offensive.
People can turn this into what they want but when people know and do nothing to protect children, no matter if they are young or in their teens as these kids were, then they are just as guilty as Foley.