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i'd say the entire ins ute has been dysfunctional for quite a while.
October 9, 2006
Evangelicals Blame Foley, Not Republican Party
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
VIRGINIA BEACH, Oct. 7 — As word of Representative Mark Foley’s sexually explicit e-mail messages to former pages spread last week, Republican strategists worried — and Democrats hoped — that the sordid nature of the scandal would discourage conservative Christians from going to the polls.
But in dozens of interviews here in southeastern Virginia, a conservative Christian stronghold that is a battleground in races for the House and Senate, many said the episode only reinforced their reasons to vote for their two Republican in bents in neck-and-neck re-election fights, Representative Thelma Drake and Senator George Allen.
“This is Foley’s lifestyle,” said Ron Gwaltney, a home builder, as he waited with his family outside a Christian rock concert last Thursday in Norfolk. “He tried to keep it quiet from his family and his voters. He is responsible for what he did. He is paying a price for what he did. I am not sure how much farther it needs to go.”
( how convenient, that it "need to go" not into how many Repugs covered up Foley for 5 years )
The Democratic Party is “the party that is tolerant of, maybe more so than Republicans, that lifestyle,” Mr. Gwaltney said, referring to sexuality.
( the evangelicals are pro-intolerance, right! )
Most of the evangelical Christians interviewed said that so far they saw Mr. Foley’s behavior as a matter of personal morality, not ins utional dysfunction.
( ... one of the many factually erroneous requirements to be an evangelical )
All said the question of broader responsibility had quickly devolved into a storm of partisan charges and countercharges. And all insisted the episode would have little impact on their intentions to vote.
It is too soon to tell if the scandal will affect the turnout of evangelical Christians, who make up about a quarter of the electorate and more than a third of Republican voters. Some of President Bush’s political advisers have said that pre-election reports in 2000 that Mr. Bush was once arrested for drunken driving depressed turnout among conservative Christians, nearly costing him the White House.
( evangelicals are really Old Testament, always ready to punish, never forget, never forgive, even their boy dubya. Would Christ, who is way too loving for evangelicals, have forgiven dubya for a traffic misdemeanor? Or was is it dubya's drinking they hate? )
Pollsters and conservative leaders have said for months that grass-roots evangelicals were demoralized by what they felt was the Republicans’ failure to live up to their talk about social issues — to say nothing of the economy, the Iraq war and other issues that weigh more broadly across the electorate. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center showed a steep drop in conservative Christian support for Republicans, albeit without a corresponding gain for the Democrats.
Some in the crowd waiting outside the concert, by the evangelical group MercyMe, said the revelations about Mr. Foley, Republican of Florida, had redoubled their previous concerns about the Republican Party.
“The Republicans need to tighten up their ship,” said Wade Crane, a sign maker from Virginia Beach who said he usually voted Republican but had soured on the party in the last several months. “They need to stop covering themselves, using their power to protect themselves.”
Charles W. Dunn, dean of the school of government at Regent University, founded here by the religious broadcaster Pat Robertson, said that so many conservative Christians were already in a funk about the party that “the Foley issue just opens up the potential floodgate for losses.” The tawdry accusations, Mr. Dunn said, “give life” to the charges of Republican corruption that had been merely “latent” in the minds of many voters.
( latent? GMAFB!!
But as far as culpability in the Foley case, Mr. Dunn said, House Republicans may benefit from the evangelical conception of sin. Where liberals tend to think of collective responsibility, conservative Christians focus on personal morality. “The conservative Christian audience or base has this acute moral lens through which they look at this, and it is very personal,” Mr. Dunn said. “This is Foley’s personal sin.”
To a person, those interviewed said that Speaker J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois should resign if he knew of the most serious claims against Mr. Foley and failed to stop him. They said the degree of Mr. Hastert’s responsibility remained to be seen. Many said the issue had not changed their view of Congress because, in their opinion, it could not sink any lower.
But all also noted that the swift Democratic efforts to broaden the scandal to Mr. Hastert and other Republicans had added more than a whiff of partisanship to the stink of the scandal.
As the details were emerging last Tuesday, for example, Phil Kellam, the Democrat challenging Ms. Drake, called on her to demand Mr. Hastert’s immediate resignation. In a statement, Mr. Kellam said the House Republican leaders’ “lack of attention” was “perhaps more shocking” than what Mr. Foley had done.
Drew Lankford, a spokesman for Mr. Kellam, said the attacks on Ms. Drake had “painted her into a corner” because she was unwilling to denounce Mr. Hastert. Ms. Drake has said she will wait for a thorough investigation into what Mr. Hastert knew. (The matter has come up less in the Senate race between Mr. Allen and Jim Webb, the Democrat.)
Brian Courtney, a Republican-leaning sales manager attending the concert, said the Foley affair had led to “the kind of mudslinging one would expect to see at an election time like this.” He added that he was paying closer attention to the “values and character” of the candidates, and that he would probably vote Republican again.
Republicans have put up a vigorous defense, mainly through conservative allies and on talk radio. An e-mail message to talk-radio hosts from the Republican Party last week asked, “How would Democrats react if one of their own had a sexual relationship with an intern, was found out, then lied to a grand jury in an attempt to cover it up?”
Rush Limbaugh devoted much of his airtime to the Democrats’ defense of President Bill Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Sean Hannity focused on former Representative Gerry Studds, a Massachusetts Democrat who in 1983 admitted having sex with a teenage male page, won re-election and served several more terms with the support of his colleagues.
( these rabble rousers can't defend the Repugs, so they go back decades to drag up Dem cases to show the horrible Repugs are no worse than the Dems. The rabble/sheeple fall for it every time!
Still, many conservative churchgoers said that what stood out for them was not the politics but the individual sin. “It is not going to affect my vote because I don’t live in Florida,” said Scott O’Connell, a mechanical engineer who described himself as a fundamentalist. “But there is a bigger moral issue which I would say is the prism I view this through: I do not believe in sexuality.”
David Thomas, a father taking his family to the concert, said that he, too, was leaning toward voting Republican and that the scandal only reinforced his conservative Christian convictions. “That is the problem we have in society,” Mr. Thomas said. “Nobody polices anybody. Everybody has a ‘right’ to do whatever.”
( Holy ! "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" is NOT on the evanglical sects's political agenda. The suppression of such is. )
In an interview on Friday, Pastor Anne Gimenez of the 15,000-member Rock Church here said the scandal “doesn’t change the issues we are voting on,” like abortion, public expression of religion and same-sex marriage.
( the Repugs' phony Iraq war and its compromise of US security, THE KEY ISSUE facing America, is NOT evne on the evangelical sect's agenda. "You can have your murderous, phony Repug war, just give us gay-bashing, no abortion, and breaking down the Cons utional separat between (our sect) and state." )
The church has been actively registering parishioners and reminding them to vote. “Every Sunday already,” Ms. Gimenez said.
===========
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/09/us...ervatives.html
i'd say the entire ins ute has been dysfunctional for quite a while.
One bad apple shouldn't ruin the whole party but it seems to me that there was more than a few bad apples involved in this scandal. But I can understand since I sure as didn't condemn the entire democratic party just because Bill got a little blow in the Oval Office. People will put their party ahead of their morals sometimes.
Wow! Truly amazing! Foley's shame has taken down the entire Republican Party and tainted all Evangelicals in One Fell Swoop!
Foley won't have any effect on the election, except in Foley's district. It surprises me that so many people seem to think it will. Democrats should be careful they don't negatively affect their candidates by overplaying their hand in the name of partisan opportunism.
I'm shocked that the emails haven't led to an international crises, the magnitude of which has never before been witnessed!Wow! Truly amazing! Foley's shame has taken down the entire Republican Party and tainted all Evangelicals in One Fell Swoop!
(Cue to Boutons to Copy and Paste just such an article)
Why is that republicans made such a big deal about a blow job between consenting adults but want to sweep a pedophile's lude actions under the rug?
(sigh) Do we really need to hash this over again?
-Clinton was President, represented the entire Country and lied about his tryst to a Grand Jury.
- Foley's a State Rep. and admitted to his problem.
Now if Foley were President you'd have made a good point. But he isn't, and you didn't.
Next!
My point is that the republicans took Clinton to task over a blow job and wasted millions of tax payer dollars over it and for what? Nothing.
And Foley didn't admit to until he was busted but it was the booze that was talking right?
NEXT!!
"Clinton was President"
The distraction of the FLAG/Scaif-financed Paula Jones suit and the impeachment that the less Repugs couldn't consummate tooks 100s of hours and attention of Clinton from being president.
If the Repugs could exchange those 100s of hours of Clinton's wasted time for Clinton spending the same time and energy on chasing al-Quaida, would the Repugs make that exchange?
I bet not, since the Repugs place vicious, smash-mouth, no-compromise partisan politics above US national security.
The Repugs DID NOTHING against al-Quaida before 9/11 and allowed OBL to bring down the WTC, and now they slime Clinton for not doing enough.
What do you want them to do, impeach Foley?
You're like a broken record. You say the same EVERY post.
"Foley won't have any effect on the election, except in Foley's district."
=======
GOP Officials Brace for Loss Of Seven to 30 House Seats
By Jim VandeHei and Chris Cillizza
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, October 10, 2006; A01
Republican campaign officials said yesterday that they expect to lose at least seven House seats and as many as 30 in the Nov. 7 midterm elections, as a result of sustained violence in Iraq and the page scandal involving former GOP representative Mark Foley.
Democrats need to pick up 15 seats in the election to take back control of the House after more than a decade of GOP leadership. Two weeks of virtually nonstop controversy over President Bush's war policy and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert's handling of the page scandal have forced party leaders to recalculate their vulnerability and placed a growing number of Republican in bents and open seats at much greater risk.
GOP officials are urging lawmakers to focus exclusively on local issues
( yep, because all the Repugs' inter/national issues are all negative)
and leave it to party leaders to mitigate the Foley controversy by accusing Democrats of trying to politicize it.
( that will works really well,)
At the same time, the White House plans to amplify national security issues,
( scare the out of everybody by overhyping the threat, while hoping that Repug-instigated Foley has pushed the very dangerous NIE/Woodward disasaster out of people's pathologically short memories )
especially the threat of terrorism, after North Korea's reported nuclear test, in hopes of shifting the debate away from casualties and controversy during the final month of the campaign. These efforts are aimed largely at prodding disaffected conservatives to vote for GOP candidates despite their unease.
( the number on issue is the Repug Iraq fiasco, and the Repugs who created it )
Still, GOP leaders privately said that Democrats are edging much closer to locking down a majority of House seats because a small but significant number of conservatives are frustrated with Republican governance, while independent swing voters are turning against GOP candidates.
"If you are a Democrat, you have to like the atmosphere," said Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (Va.), a top campaign strategist for the GOP. Davis said Republicans could lose as many as 30 seats if conditions worsen.
With four weeks left in the campaign, GOP strategists, speaking on background, have begun to outline a highly gloomy view of the House election for their party.
( what about Rove's October suprise? Was it outing Foley (the Repugs knew they had to do this sometime), to push NIE/Woodward off the front pages? )
They are all but writing off GOP open seats in Arizona, Colorado, Texas and Florida (the one previously held by Foley). Party officials said that three GOP in bents in Indiana are trailing in private polling and that seats thought safe suddenly appear imperiled. These include the open Florida seat vacated by Rep. Katherine Harris, who is running for senator. "It is unquestionably closer than we would like," said Rep. Adam Putnam (R-Fla.).
In a sign that the political environment is getting worse for Republicans, political handicapper Charlie Cook now lists 25 GOP-held seats as a tossup -- seven more than before the Foley scandal broke Sept. 29. Stuart Rothenberg, a nonpartisan expert on House races, has raised to nine the number of GOP seats tilting Democratic or likely to switch hands.
Unlike in most elections, when both parties defend several seats, Democrats are favored to win every seat they now occupy and are spending money to defend only a few. As a result, Democrats are not as vulnerable to the GOP's campaign finance advantage in the final weeks as they have been in past campaigns.
A Democratic takeover of the House is not a foregone conclusion, however. Because of congressional redistricting plans that gave huge advantages to in bents, fewer than 50 of the 435 House seats are compe ive. Democrats said internal polls show that the fallout from the Foley scandal is confined to half a dozen races. Moreover, House elections are traditionally shaped by local issues and personalities, and the closest races come down to which party can turn out its most loyal voters.
The page scandal erupted two weeks ago when Foley abruptly resigned after being confronted by ABC News with sexually explicit messages that he exchanged with a former page on the Internet. Investigations by the Justice Department, the House ethics committee and Florida authorities have ensued.
The GOP's emerging strategy on the Foley scandal is to try to limit losses among conservative voters who are expressing alarm about the scandal and about the apparent failure of GOP leaders to act on early warnings about Foley's behavior.
As part of that strategy, the Republican National Committee is seeking to convince conservatives that the debate is fundamentally centered on politics, not values. The RNC is shipping reams of information to conservative radio hosts, television commentators and bloggers. Those GOP talking points detail the Democratic connections of groups including the Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and American Family Voices, which are working to turn the scandal into an issue with national implications.
The NRCC is highlighting Democratic leaders who supported former representative Gerry E. Studds (Mass.), who was censured by the House in 1983 after admitting to sexual contact with a male page a decade earlier; Studds went on to serve in Congress until 1997. "It is important to contrast how Republican leadership is handling the situation with problems with one of its own, and how Democrats did," said former RNC chairman Ed Gillespie, a close White House ally.
Still, the "Foley factor" has made GOP strategists nervous. Several officials said it has dramatically undermined the reelection prospects of several in bents, including Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds (N.Y.), who was criticized by Democrats for not doing enough to stop Foley's advances on young male pages after learning about them this spring.
Several interest groups with Democratic ties are seeking to take advantage of Reynolds's newfound vulnerability. Majority Action, a group designed to help Democrats retake control of the House, is sponsoring a radio ad in which a narrator says: "Another scandal in Washington, and our Congressman Tom Reynolds is right in the middle." Two public polls show Reynolds trailing his Democratic challenger, Jack Davis, in a race neither side considered very compe ive a few weeks ago.
Rep. Deborah Pryce (Ohio), the fourth-ranking GOP leader, is facing the toughest reelection race of her career. She has said she had no prior knowledge of Foley's behavior but has faced criticism for telling a reporter that the former congressman was one of her closest friends in Congress.
"I don't think this is personally sticking to Deborah Pryce, but it is certainly having people have a more jaundiced view of Washington, which is not good for Republicans," said George Rasley, Pryce's spokesman. Pryce had a slight lead over Mary Jo Kilroy in her internal polling before the Foley scandal, an aide said, but Republicans expect Pryce to suffer as much as any in bent for the renewed scrutiny of congressional ethics.
Scandals are hurting Republicans elsewhere in Ohio, where charges of corruption have rocked the GOP at the local and state levels for the past two years. In the open seat vacated by indicted GOP Rep. Robert W. Ney, Joy Padgett is struggling to lock down a reliably GOP seat east of Columbus, the state capital. Polls show Democrat Zach Space, a liberal critic of the war, on top and GOP strategists agree Padgett is behind.
"It is definitely a challenge to overcome," says Padgett spokesman Morgan Ortagus. "Voters are definitely in a throw-the-bums-out mood."
Space is calling for Hastert's resignation and is asking Padgett to do the same. Padgett canceled a fundraiser with Hastert last week.
In other races where Republican in bents have been dogged by scandal, Democrats are pushing the Foley story hard.
Former representative Nick Lampson (D-Tex.) is asking Houston City Council member S ey Sekula-Gibbs (R) to call for the resignation of any member of the House leadership who knew about the e-mails and instant messages exchanged between Foley and former congressional pages. The two candidates are competing for the seat from the 22nd Congressional District, left vacant by the departure of former House majority leader Tom DeLay (R), who is under indictment in Texas.
Elsewhere, the political debate is returning to traditional disputes over the war, taxes and health care, according to Democrats and Republicans. The Foley story "is getting a lot of attention now, but I don't think it will have the legs to last four weeks," said Ron Carey, chairman of the Minnesota Republican Party.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
It all depends on how voters react on election day. What the polls say right now don't mean squat.
Bill Clinton was, in fact, impeached.
That was a proud day for Republicans and a shameful one for the country.
"Bill Clinton was, in fact, impeached."
He was impeached, but the Senate Repugs refused to remove him from office.
"It all depends on how voters react on election day"
and how well the Repugs game the voting machines, put up road construction and detours between black neighborhoods and the voting sites, how well the police intimidate poor voters, etc, etc.
Sounds like you're getting your tin foil hat all polished up!
The paranoia market is pretty much cornered these days by persecuted, martyred Hastert and Repugs who claim
Foley and Repug coverup is a Democratic plot,
the 9/11 Commission calling out the Repugs for doing nothing anti-terror before 9/11
was a Democratic plot,
the recent NIE was a Democratic plot,
the Woodward book a Democratic plot,
the mid-term elections are a Democratic plot.
Those poor, powerless, non-partisan persecuted Repugs.
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