Mark. Foley.
Apparently, Monsieur Doc Hastings has opted out of the Endorsement Process for the Yakima Herald. I understand this from a political vantage point. His opponent is underfunded and has no real means of making headway. And the way to avoid the political headache of being a Republican toady with head of the Ethics Committee is through the maxim “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”
I’ve read the endorsements the Yakima Herald gave for all of Doc Hastings’s race. As long as the Democratic opponent met a certain level of credibility — which the 1998 candidate did not, or was not perceived as too “liberal” — as the 2002 candidate was — the Democrat received the endorsement. Tellingly the endorsements were always mixed — the 2004 endorsement was practically a coin flip — but most tellingly Hastings’ drawback in the eyes of the Yakima Herald has always been a high level of deference and lack of independence to the Republican Leadership. That problem has been multiplied to the nth degree.
It is as written ever so eloquently here: Now, I have no reason to think Hastings knew about Foley, mainly because Hastings is a lump of coal. It’s easy to believe that the real powers in the GOP don’t tell him anything. […] Even if Hastings knew nothing about Foley’s actions, it does not excuse Hastings from moral culpability. Hastings has been a lump of coal on purpose; the sole intent of his chairmanship was to render the ethics committee powerless. And this is what you get–a Congress that is accountable to nobody.
The disturbances of being a functionary lackey for this particular party has been exposed as an exercise in Evil (whatever you can say about being the man who literally had the task of holding the gavel for the 15 minute Medicare Vote for that 3 hour middle of the night session — the other great exercise in being a functionary lackey).
I note that the ABC Reporter who brought us this Mark Foley scandal notes, while keeping the confidentiality, that his sources were Republicans. I wander my mind over to the last issue of the Washington Monthly, and to various murmurs of carefully couched words spoken by various Republicans over the year. The sense is that this Republican Party is untenuable, has lost its way, and the best thing for “our Conservative Goals” is to lose and spend a little bit of time in the Wilderness. I’m intimating a conspiracy theory here that makes more sense than two other conspiracy theories I’ve heard. (1) The Mark Foley story was released to take the public’s mind off of Iraq (we’ve just disbanded their police unit for the crime of merging into a Death Squad, in case you missed that story), and more specifically the Bob Woodward Book. (2) More sensical, ABC released the Mark Foley story in a competition with CBS News and 60 Minutes — our media sources shift from CBS to ABC for the most sensational story. ‘Tis business, that.