The now disgraced Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL-16) has been hoist by his own petard as he was a sponsor of the law that could result in up to 10 years in a Federal prison and inclusion on the sexual predators list. He will be forever [i.e. this election cycle] linked to the 2006 Congressional page sex scandal, so named to avoid confusion with the bipartisan 1983 Congressional page sex scandal [they had to go back to 1973 to make it bipartisan, but that’s Republicans].

I would note that the pages in the 1983 scandal were both 17 and neither complained, while one of the 16-year-olds in this scandal was clearly upset by Mr. Foley’s actions. It hasn’t been made very clear by the reporting, but there is more than one page involved if you can stand to read through the e-mails and IMs.

A common refrain heard is clearly stated in general terms by Christy Hardin Smith, and in more specific terms by Hastert constituents Karen and Michael: more concern was shown for the Republican Party than the high school students involved.

The Pensacola Beach Blog noted that buried in the messages is a references to a campaign event in Pensacola, which would mean that Foley continued long after he said he would stop.

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Lisa at All Hat and No Cattle has a great graphic in this weekend’s edition from the Democratic Underground site. It features the James Madison quote: “If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”

Earlier Jams at Poor Mouth wrote about the death of Iva Toguri, a Japanese American woman who was trapped in Japan at the start of World War II and worked on Japanese radio. Even though she was cleared of wrongdoing by the American occupation forces, when she returned to the US she was tried and convicted of helping the enemy by a corrupt legal process at the urging of Walter Winchell, the “Greatest Generation’s” version of Rush Limbaugh.

Everyone should be aware of the Japanese internment camps in World War II, so none of what is going on is new; every generation seems hell-bent on making the same stupid mistakes of earlier generations. We never seem to learn.

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