SAN DIEGO -- The Mark Foley scandal makes one nauseous but also a little nostalgic. I've been wondering: Whatever happened to the GOP? It's MIA. And if this scandal gets any worse for House Republicans, by next month's election, they could be DOA.
Call me sentimental, but I miss back when. It used to be that Republicans wouldn't accept excuses for misbehavior or weakness. And they used to love to talk about accountability, family values, and protecting children from the dangers of sexually explicit music and video games.
Video games? How quaint. It turns out that, at least for male congressional pages, the real danger was in their midst.
Republicans also love to talk sanctimoniously about law and order. You remember. These are the tough men and women who fought what they called amnesty for illegal immigrants and asked the rest of us: "What part of 'illegal' don't you understand?"
What part indeed. Before this is over, the former congressman could well be prosecuted under some of the same laws that he helped pass to protect minors from sexual predators on the Internet.
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It's appropriate that the immigration debate -- filled as it is with the hypocrisy of Americans who use illegal immigrant labor and then complain about illegal immigrants -- would make it to Washington and then get tangled up in even more hypocrisy there. The same Republican leaders who talk a good game about the need to respect our laws and not reward those who break them looked the other way when the infraction was committed by one of their own.
And they expect us to understand. The GOP has become the "poor-me" party. Forget compassionate conservatives -- some conservatives are asking for your compassion. Foley sought refuge in rehab while his lawyer helpfully informed the world that his client was gay and had been molested by a clergyman as a teenager.
What do you want to bet those disclosures were focus-grouped?
Also hoping for sympathy is embattled House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who insists that he didn't know the extent of the scandal -- including the content of some of the more vulgar and sexually explicit instant messages exchanged between Foley and teenage boys -- until he saw the story reported on ABC News.
That's it. As excuses go, that's the best Hastert can do.
This, as the media have interviewed former pages who say that it was common knowledge within their peer group that Foley was to be avoided like the plague, that he had a creepy tendency to act inappropriately toward young male pages, and that all this was known going back at least as far as a decade.
And yet Hastert says he was out of the loop and didn't know any of this was going on, or that Foley had done anything wrong besides engaging in what one congressman called "over-friendly" e-mails with one 16-year-old page in particular.
Just as Republicans were trying to swallow that whopper came the bombshell from Kirk Fordham, a former aide to Rep. Tom Reynolds, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. Fordham insists that he brought the Foley problem to the attention of "senior staff" in the House as far back as three years ago.
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Obviously, someone isn't telling the truth. But this much we know for sure: Foley has left the House and it's no thanks to Hastert or any other member of the House Republican leadership. He's gone because the media -- following ABC News' lead -- have grabbed onto this story and won't let go. If this matter had been left to Hastert and other Republican leaders, as it was for too long, Foley would still be serving in Congress and getting ready to welcome a new class of congressional pages. Now that's creepy.
House Republican leaders still have questions to answer, and let's hope their next round of responses goes better than their first. But, it's too late for Hastert, who's shown himself to be at least incompetent and negligent and perhaps, at most, devious enough to lead a cover-up simply to prevent what happened in the last week from happening at all. Hastert must resign.
The old Republican Party -- the one advertised in the brochure -- would have demanded it, and would have accepted nothing less.
Ruben Navarrette's e-mail address is navarrette@wctrib.com .
