Disappointed

I thought the right stood for family values. I thought the right would be the first to support the child the Rep. Mark Foley was trying to have an affair with. Here is what they are saying:

Hannity: I want to know why these instant messages were held back until now. Who knew about them? Why did they hold them back? Did they do it for political reasons? In other words, were they held back to maximize the political impact before an election? [Democratic strategist] Bob Beckel, you've been around politics a long time. That would not be beyond the realm of possibility. There seems to be a lot of double standards, in my mind. There's a lot of selective moral outrage. We see a lot of things unfolding just before an election. You see that this is just pure politics. Is there any principle left?

Bill KRISTOL: Well, Foley is responsible for it, and the voters in Florida, I guess, who elected him. Maybe they should have known better. But, of course, no one knows. These things happen. People turn out to be creeps and they conceal it pretty well, and then they turn out to be creeps and you act against them.

Tony Perkins of the Conservative Family Research Council: PERKINS: Oh, I -- there's no defense of this behavior. It's outrageous; it's shocking. But it shouldn't be totally surprising when we hold up tolerance and diversity as the guidepost for public life. This is what you end up getting: a congressman chasing 16-year-old boys down the halls of Congress. It's a shame. It's a tragedy. And it does need to be addressed, but not just the symptoms here.

A Wall Street Journal Editorial:
In our admittedly traditional view, this was odd and suspect behavior, especially because Mr. Foley was well known as a homosexual even if he declined to publicly acknowledge it. And Mr. Hastert was informed that fellow Illinois Republican John Shimkus -- who oversees the page program as part of a six-member board -- spoke privately with Mr. Foley, who explained that the email was innocent.

What next was Mr. Hastert supposed to do with an elected Congressman? Assume that Mr. Foley was a potential sexual predator and bar him from having any private communication with pages? Refer him to the Ethics Committee? In retrospect, barring contact with pages would have been wise.

But in today's politically correct culture, it's easy to understand how senior Republicans might well have decided they had no grounds to doubt Mr. Foley merely because he was gay and a little too friendly in emails. Some of those liberals now shouting the loudest for Mr. Hastert's head are the same voices who tell us that the larger society must be tolerant of private lifestyle choices, and certainly must never leap to conclusions about gay men and young boys. Are these Democratic critics of Mr. Hastert saying that they now have more sympathy for the Boy Scouts' decision to ban gay scoutmasters? Where's Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on that one?

Newt Gingrich: "had the House GOP leadership overly aggressively reacted to the initial round, they would also have been accused of gay bashing."

Matt Drudge:I'm just saying from reading these instant messages, this wasn't coerced. I mean, this wasn't somebody -- the kid was having fun with this. These LOLs throughout the entire conversation, these "laugh out louds."

And if anything, these kids are less innocent, these 16- and 17-year-old beasts. And I've seen what they're doing on YouTube, and I've seen what they're doing all over the Internet. Oh yeah. And you just have to tune into any part of their pop culture. You're not going to tell me these are innocent babies. Have you read the transcripts that ABC posted going into the weekend of these instant messages, back and forth? The kids are egging the congressman on! The kids are trying to get this out of him. We haven't got the whole story on this.

You could say, "Well, Drudge, it's abuse of power. This is a congressman abusing these impressionable, young 17-year-old beasts. Talking about their sex lives with a grown man, on the Internet." Because you have to remember, those of us who have seen some of the transcripts of these nasty instant messages. This was two ways, ladies and gentlemen. These kids were playing Foley for everything he was worth. Oh yeah. Oh, I haven't -- you know, they were talking about how many times they've masturbated, and oh, they didn't do it with their girlfriends this weekend. All this -- all these things and these innocent children. And this poor congressman sitting there typing about, "Oh, am I going to get any?" You know?

Michael Savage: You know, don't put me in a position of defending him because it's indefensible. He did it to my kid, I guarantee you, when the kid was that age, I would've, I would've been unhappy, let's put it to you that way. OK. But, the kid was leading him on. I mean, this kid was a, was leading him on. You know what I'm saying? You read these things. Who is the kid? Maybe he's a Democrat. Maybe it's a -- I don't know who it is. Is there a real kid? Now, I could argue that the age of consent is 16 in Washington, he really didn't have sex, that it's not illegal to actually have sex with a 16-year-old, but it's illegal to write an email suggesting sex, to show you how crazy America is. I mean, there are other observations to be drawn here. Like, the boy was playing along with Foley, the deviant, and it's all part of the American obsession with sex, which it is.

Now, I don't know whether the boy exists. The boy sounds like a sleaze ball to me, by the way, for playing along and -- you know, it's a little bit of gay-baiting, incidentally. You want to get into this, you want to go two ways on this one. I'll go every which way, because I got a kaleidoscopic mind. This kid was baiting him. This kid was playing with him, he's no innocent kid. This kid went to Washington to get ahead, let's be very clear. I'm not going to make dirty jokes now, because I could if I was on the stage, because the audience wants it and I know how to play the audience, but it's radio. He went to Washington to get ahead. So he's a greedy, aggressive child from a family that was pushing him like a stage mother. All right, so he knew how to play a congressman who was gay on the gay theme. Let's be clear, we're grown-ups here. And that has to be discussed. What, all of a sudden 16 is a boy? First of all, boy is not 16.

And last this exchange between Hassert and Limbaugh and a commentary by Limbaugh:

LIMBAUGH: Nancy Pelosi knows the person who planted the story about Foley five weeks before the election. "But Rush! But Rush! But Rush! Tell us what you know! How can you be sure she knows?" Well, I can almost guarantee it. She might not know who specifically did it. But she knows where it comes from. All the liberal Democrats do. She knows the person because this -- these emails were held by a liberal, they were planted by a liberal, and they were timed to the 2006 election cycle by a liberal. And liberals know liberals, and so Pelosi knows who Deep IM is. There's a Deep IM here. Not Deep Throat, but there's a Deep IM.



HASTERT: But, you know, this is a political issue in itself, too, and what we've tried to do as the Republican Party is make a better economy, protect this country against terrorism -- and we've worked at it ever since 9-11, worked with the president on it -- and there are some people that try to tear us down. We are the insulation to protect this country, and if they get to me, it looks like they could affect our election as well.

LIMBAUGH: Well, it's clear to me that what the Democrats are doing here in some sort of cooperation with some in the media is to suppress conservative turnout by making it look like you guys knew this all along but because you're so interested in holding the House rather than protecting children that you covered it up.

HASTERT: Yeah.

LIMBAUGH: And I like what you said yesterday, if I may editorialize this way, when you said, "Look, somebody knew this long before we knew it. Somebody knew about those instant messages," and you asked for an investigation into who knew what when. We know that a couple of newspapers in Florida knew a lot more than they were willing to release, and Brian Ross of ABC admitted that he knew about this all the way back in August but he didn't have time for it then because he was worried about the Katrina anniversary and September 11th and so forth.


LIMBAUGH: What is the battle plan to deal with these continuing allegations and accusations that are going to be designed to depress voter turnout? I'm talking about in the media when you dispatch --

HASTERT: One of the things that we have to do -- we're doing a media outreach, but you understand that a lot of that media is not going to listen to us. Our issue is we have to go back local. That's why we got our folks back home on the campaign trail. I'm going to be in 30-some districts over the break. I'm to leave Monday morning, and we're gonna be continuing on the trail, and we have a story to tell. And the Democrats have -- in my view, have put this thing forward to try to block us from telling the story. They're trying to put us on defense. The story is that we have protected this country against terrorism. The story is we have created a good economy in this country, and the story is that we have a plan for energy independence, which we have to do as well. And that's important.



LIMBAUGH: Folks, you don't know the Democrats like I do. Everybody is now comin' out of the closet, if you will, saying they knew Foley was gay. He's in a safe seat. Somebody knew this was going on. Go to one of the kids or go to a couple of pages and say: "Titillate the guy." "Why? Why? Why? I don't want to get in trouble." "You won't get in trouble. You'll be a hero. Nobody'll ever know it's you. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." How do you get a kid to do this? You threaten 'em or you pay 'em. I don't know.


LIMBAUGH: You know, how do these pages get into the page program? How does this happen? One way is through political connections, political patronage. So who are these pages and who sponsored these kids to become pages and, and for, for what reason? Is there a political party that would stoop this low? Yes, there is. We know that there is a political party that would stoop this low to set somebody up this way.

Now, I know you're saying: "What do you mean 'set him up?' Did it, Rush!" Yeah. I'm not -- again -- you're, you're missin' my point if you're thinking in that regard. I'm not saying that this didn't happen. What, what I'm suggesting here is that a lot of people knew of Foley's proclivities and arranged to amass evidence of it for this very reason, not the protection of the kids. Look how long this is goin' on and nobody did anything to protect the children. Everybody's out there saying: "Now, now we love the children of this country. We're gonna do everything we can to protect the page program. Why, why everything is for the children."

Well, the people involved in this couldn't have cared less about the children. They didn't find the behavior repugnant, but they thought Republican voters would.



LIMBAUGH: This is, this is so obviously a planned, orchestrated release -- timed release of information that's designed to keep the story going. I know how these people in the drive-by media work. I know how the coordinate with the Democrat [sic] Party. They're all excited.

Thanks to mediamaters for their great work with the quotes so to sum up how the right-wing is thinking. According to them it's democrats, the media (which they forget they are apart of) gays, the childs, societies, everyone's fault but there's. Family values except for them. THey truly are disgusting.