It's fascinating to see how the Gutknecht campaign is spinning the Foley matter and the impeding visit to MN-01 by Foley scandal cover-up member John Boehner.
The New Ulm Journal covers a Gutknecht campaign stop in the Brown County town. Yes, Gutknecht says, the emails received by the page are reprehensible, but nothing physical happened, and the GOP House leadership knew “a lot less about this than meet the eye":
Gutknecht said Democrats seem to be overplaying the issue for political advantage, and speculated that an investigation might show House Republican leaders knew “a lot less about this than meet the eye.”
Gutknecht agreed that an investigation was in order.
“We have to. One of our first obligations, when those young people come out to Washington, we have a moral obligation to protect them.
Gutknecht said it appears that the main wrong suffered by the page was the reception of inappropriate e-mails, that nothing physical happened. “Nonetheless, it is reprehensible, and we need to deal with it aggressively and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Neither Gutknecht nor the conservative New Ulm Journal acknowledges Foley's text message exchanges with pages or the breaking revelations about what the GOP House leadership had been warned about Foley's behavior three years ago, as ABC News reports:
Foley's former chief of staff said in an Associated Press interview that he first warned Hastert's aides more than three years ago that Foley's behavior toward pages was troublesome. That was long before GOP leaders acknowledged learning of the problem.
Gutknecht campaign spokesman and Wikipedia tweaker Bryan Anderson says the Boehner visit at Minnesot State at Mankato:
would go on as planned. “This is an opportunity for young people in Southern Minnesota to talk to one of our nation’s leaders. We have no plans to cancel the event."
Anderson then brings up Walz's 1995 reckless driving incident. Yeah, that's the moral equivalent of providing cover for a sexual predator.
Perhaps Boehner can teach the students a course in post-modern situational ethics.
Boehner has changed his story several times, a great lesson for young people (it's the sort of lesson we learned from Bryan Anderson himself in the Wikipedia editing episode, but we digress). Bloomberg reported on Oct. 3:
Boehner Says Foley Was Hastert's `Responsibility' (Update5)
By Jay Newton-Small and Brian Faler
Oct. 3 (Bloomberg) -- House Majority Leader John Boehner said Speaker Dennis Hastert was responsible for how the case of Mark Foley's inappropriate e-mails to pages was handled, while saying he disagreed with calls for Hastert to step down.
``I believe I had talked to the speaker and he told me it had been taken care of,'' Boehner, an Ohio Republican, told Cincinnati 700 WLW Radio this morning. ``It's in his corner, it's his responsibility.''
The Congressional Page Board and others overseeing the program, ``all report to the speaker,'' Boehner told the station.
Separately, Boehner wrote a letter to the Washington Times saying he disagreed with the newspaper's call for Hastert's resignation. ``Had Speaker Hastert or anyone else in our leadership known about Mr. Foley's despicable conduct, I'm confident the speaker would have moved to expel Mr. Foley immediately,'' Boehner wrote to the paper.
The Center for Media and Democracy notes Boehner's earlier claims to have told Hastert, then withdrawal of the statement:
More fishy behavior came from House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio). On Friday evening, he told the Washington Post that he had first learned of the inappropriate contact between Foley and the page in the spring of 2006, and that he then contacted Hastert concerning the matter. Oddly, Boehner later contacted the Post to state that he could not remember whether or not he had spoken with Hastert.
That retraction has obviously been retracted. In another article, Bloomberg reports on a rift between Boehner and Hastert:
Hastert has said he doesn't remember the conversation.
House Majority Leader John Boehner said yesterday that he spoke to Hastert about Foley's ``overly friendly'' e-mails and considered it Hastert's ``responsibility.''
Hastert insists that neither he nor his staff knew about other more explicit instant text messages that Foley sent to former pages in other earlier exchanges.
[Conservative activist Paul] Weyrich said it was clear in his conversation with Hastert that there is a rift now between the speaker and Boehner. Hastert insisted that Boehner never spoke to him about concerns about Foley.
``He said that Boehner absolutely did not talk to him,'' Weyrich said.
`Irritated'
``He was irritated, and I don't blame him,'' he said of Hastert's reaction to Boehner's remarks yesterday. ``I think Boehner gratuitously went out of his way to shaft the speaker.''
A spokesman for Boehner said that Boehner has made clear he stands by the speaker, and said that ``they continue to communicate.''
``Mr. Boehner supports the speaker and the speaker enjoys the support of the conference,'' said spokesman Kevin Madden.
Yep, that's the kind of leadership and commitment to reform Congress that young people in Minnesota clearly need to see first hand.
The New Ulm Journal correctly points out that when Gutknecht spoke of a "distraction" in the earlier Bloomberg article, he wasn't just talking about a sex scandal and cover-up in the House. Nope, voters might also get distracted by revelations about the mismanagement of the Iraq War and an intelligence report that indicates the war has created more terrorists.
Implicit in the New Ulm Journal article is the notion that since Gutknecht labeled up two other issues as distractions, voters might wish to dismiss concerns that Gutknecht considers the Foley scandal as a distraction as well.
We think not; rather, the statements illustrates his lack of common sense in that all three issues are trivialized.
Of course, campaigning on the war against terrorism wasn't a distraction when Gutknecht brought House intelligence committee head Pete Hoekstra to Rochester back in September. Nor were questions about the handling of the Iraq War a distraction after Gutknecht returned from Baghdad in July.
OLLIE OX UPDATE: Hat tip to the Wege for the added Washington Post link about the page text messages.
Foley's actions are deplorable but the lack of oversight and response to the complaints by Republican Rep. John Shimkus and Rodney Alexander are the real issue. Months later, Alexander must have felt that his concerns were not being addressed if he consulted Tom Reynolds ... which leads to the question of who brought it to the attention of John Boehner. Remember Boehner was not the Majority Leader until February 3, 2006 and the Shimkus/Foley meeting occurred in the fall of 2005.
This is just another illustration of poor management by the GOP ( Iraq occupation, Iraq reconstruction, Katrina ) where the assumption is that someone else will take responsiblity to resolve the problem.
Regarding Gutknecht, he's right. This scandal is a distraction and a blessing. There is no reference that he was involved in anyway; so voters although they may be mad at the Republican leadership, may not hold him accountable. He can stand on a higher moral ground. The attention to Foley, means that Gutknecht does not have to answer questions of his own ineffective performance for southern Minnesotans while marching to the orders as a RoveRobot helping corporate interests. The focus needs to be on the deficit, health care, an encompassing energy policy (not just a 10/10 plan), fair compensation for workers and the military, etc.
Posted by: MinnesotaCentral | October 05, 2006 at 10:43 AM