Prometheus 6

Mark Foley was chairman of a House caucus on missing and exploited children. This was a party that literally put a pedophile in charge of pedophilia.

Does that have a vaguely familiar ring? It should. It’s the same party that put the oil companies in charge of energy policy, and invited the drug and insurance industries to write the Medicare prescription bill for their own maximum profit. As investigations have revealed, it put lobbyists for polluting industries in charge of environmental protection. 

Same song, different scandal
By Robert Kuttner  |  October 7, 2006

THROUGHOUT THE Bush era, voters have not always connected the dots. The Foley scandal now enveloping the House Republican leadership offers a belated opportunity for voters to make some connections. Yes, the scandal is about the disgrace of a congressman sending disgusting messages to teenage pages, and the failure of leaders to act on escalating warnings. But it is so much more.

Mark Foley was chairman of a House caucus on missing and exploited children. This was a party that literally put a pedophile in charge of pedophilia.

Does that have a vaguely familiar ring? It should. It’s the same party that put the oil companies in charge of energy policy, and invited the drug and insurance industries to write the Medicare prescription bill for their own maximum profit. As investigations have revealed, it put lobbyists for polluting industries in charge of environmental protection. So there is a consistent theme here of the fox guarding the chicken coop.

And more. If the account of House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert ignoring bad news about Foley also sounds familiar, it should, too. It is of a piece with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld burying intelligence accounts that did not square with the Saddam Hussein-Al Qaeda story he was peddling, and the White House blowing off intelligence warnings about an impending Al Qaeda operation in summer 2001. As Bob Woodward recently revealed, these warnings went as high as CIA Director George Tenet paying an urgent call on then White House National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice warning of an imminent attack, only to be rebuffed.

It’s not surprising that Hastert did not lead. He was handpicked by then majority leader Tom DeLay to be a reassuring and largely powerless figurehead speaker. When DeLay fell, the cardboard Hastert was not up to the job.

This pattern should also ring a bell. It was Dick Cheney, selected in 2000 by party leaders to find a running mate for novice candidate George W. Bush, who conducted a national search and then selected himself. Cheney, like DeLay, has been the power behind the throne. And when the time comes for hard decisions, Bush, like Hastert, is AWOL.