Foley's Folly

What a lame title! Actually its pretty sweet. I wonder if the NY Times thought of that!

I haven't posted an entry in a while. My avid readership must have been lost geese without my guidance.

Anyway, the Foley scandal is all over the news. To be honest, I don't really give a hoot about this type of news. But you have got to read the transcript that J from the PDB pointed me towards. It is hilarious! I can't believe this dude was a Congressman...or a Senator. Whatever.

Read!!!!

And here is the entire transcript!

It's in PDF format readers...

---------------UPDATE----------------
the background. Thanks to TIME magazine

Opinion may be divided over whether the e-mails Florida Representative Mark Foley sent a teen-age male congressional page last year were inappropriate or even constituted outright sexual harassment. But most observers would agree that what was almost as surprising as the allegations themselves was how swiftly the six-term Republican congressman from West Palm Beach quit a thriving career on Capitol Hill after the e-mails were aired Thursday night on the ABC evening news. And a big reason for his abrupt exit, say Florida pundits, is that Foley, 52, was staring at the elements of a perfect political storm that not even a candidate from a hurricane-prone state could withstand in today's nasty election climate: not only possible accusations of pedophilia, but also the possible stain of gross hypocrisy, given Foley's high-profile legislative crusade against child sex offenders. "I am deeply sorry and I apologize for letting down my family and the people of Florida," Foley said in a statement confirming that he would not seek re-election next month.

His work against child sex offenders is certainly the most glaring irony of the emerging Foley scandal. Foley is a founder and co-chair of the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus and has played key roles in recent legislation to protect kids, including the Volunteers for Children Act, which gives organizations that work with youths access to FBI fingerprint checks to make sure they don't hire child molesters. Foley's Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act, which has passed both the House and Senate, overhauls the national monitoring system for predatory pedophiles by closing legal loopholes, setting minimum registration standards and better coordinating law enforcement; he also co-sponsored measures to eliminate child pornography and exploitive child model sites on the Internet — and he has worked closely with the likes of John Walsh, host of Fox TV's popular America's Most Wanted.

Foley's aides insist that the e-mails in question do nothing to belie his commitment to child protection issues, saying the exchanges between the congressman and the page — in which Foley asks what the boy would like for his birthday and requests a picture of him — were innocuous and "nonchalant" chat. But the boy, a page in the office of Louisiana Representative Rodney Alexander, also a Republican, e-mailed other colleagues saying Foley's messages "freaked me out," and he repeatedly called the photo request "sick."

In other e-mail exchanges with the page, Foley discusses another boy who he remarks is "in really great shape — i am just finished riding my bike on a 25 mile journey now heading to the gym — what school like for you this year?" As a result, the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a left-leaning congressional watchdog group, has asked the House Committee on Standards and Official Conduct to investigate, saying the legislators have "an obligation to protect the teenagers who come to Congress to learn about the legislative process." The committee, it said, "must investigate any allegation that a page has been subjected to sexual advances by members of the House."