Hoisted on their own petard

The Foley thing goes from bad to worse. Apparently the GOP Cardinals had a pretty good sense 5 years ago about the guy's predilections. The MSM's coverage has a lot of helpful graphics showing the 5 congressmen who were informed about the "creepy" e-mail. I can understand why the kid's parents didn't want to make a big fuss about this--they were Republicans who had seen how the party machine could turn John Kerry's Viet Nam service into a liability. Imagine what those powerful people could have done to their son. These are scary people. Read Autumn of the Patriarch if you want to understand what world we're dealing with here. I had an employee who had been abused by one of Cardinal Law's priests. His parents had gone to the church's authorities and had been told, get out of our face. And we still haven't heard about actual sex as opposed to the internet variety.

Update, 10/2/06

The Washington Post this a.m. confirms that the pages were not reporting Foley's advances because of fear of retribution:

"That's part of your concern about coming forward," Loraditch [who runs the U.S. House Page Alumni Association's Internet message board] said. "You take down a Congress member, and you can't end up trying to do something later."

Two additional thoughts: If it is true that incoming pages were warned to watch out for Foley five years ago, Foley must have done something before that that raised concerns. What did he do? When we know what the Republicans knew about Foley in 1999 and 2000, then we'll have a better sense of how bad this is for the Republicans. And I continue to believe that where there's smoke, there's fire: Foley's clearly trolling for young flesh in these IMs. Are we to believe that in 12 years in Washington, he didn't succeed once?