I have to say this despite not wanting to delve into politics except in open threads.

We now learn the House GOP leadership knew about Foley’s “overly friendly” relationships with male pages as early as 2001.

The White House says (via Tony Snow-Job) that it’s a case of “simply naughty emails” even though we have examples of Foley asking a teenager to measure his penis and telling the same teenager that the government representative is “a little to [sic] interested in” him despite the teenager reiterating he’s under 18, still a virgin, and doesn’t want to do anything illegal.

The Republicans are now trying to say it was the Democrats who sat on this information despite the Democrat representative on the Ethics Committee not even being informed in 2005 of the “overly friendly” e-mails the GOP knew about already.

The GOP knew about this at least a year ago, possibly even five years ago, yet did no investigation.  It took ABC News less than 24 hours of investigation to come up with a myriad of examples of Foley’s inappropriate contact with underage boys, including a plethora of e-mails and IM chats that made quite clear precisely how far this pedophile had gone.  What they have is clearly illegal from Foley’s perspective, yet Republican leaders want us to think they were concerned about it a year (possibly years) ago when they learned of the exchanges?  If that’s the case, why didn’t they investigate?  It would have easily demonstrated this man was a menace to children and had no right being in government, leading the child safety caucus in the House, or even being a free man.

Oh, and the guy in charge of the congressional page program said he was clearly warned about Foley as far back as 2001.  THEY KNEW!  What the fuck is up with these people?  And who the hell do they think they’re kidding?