Early this evening I was starting to think that Foleygate might truly be the scandal that dare not speak its name. I don’t mean whatever Mark Foley himself did. He’s apologized, resigned and, I imagine, will soon face criminal indictment under laws he helped write. In a sense, that scandal has run its course. The scandal I’m talking about is the mix 
of cover-up and enabling that reached its way through the highest reaches of the House Republican leadership. Early this evening neither the Post nor the Times had devoted a story specifically to the contradictory stories coming out of the House leadership. Now, though, that seems to have changed.
I’ve been at this blog racket for almost six years. And usually you’ve got to really pore over the details to find the inconsistencies and contradictions. So I’m not sure I’ve ever seen this big a train wreck where leaders at the highest eschelons of power repeatedly fib, contradict each other and change their stories so quickly. It’s mendacity as performance art; you can see the story unravel in real time.
Just consider, Denny Hastert has repeatedly said he didn’t know anything about the Foley problem until Thursday. But two members of the leadership — Boehner and Reynolds — say no, they warned him about it months ago. Hastert got Boehner to recant; Reynolds is sticking to his guns.
Rodney Alexander brought the matter to the Speaker’s office. And Hastert’s office tonight put out the results of a detailed internal review of what happened in which they revealed that no member of the House leadership — not Hastert or Shimkus or the House Clerk — had actually laid eyes on the emails in question.
Only Hastert’s office apparently didn’t touch base with Rep. Shimkus, since as Hastert’s crew was writing out their statement, Shimkus was over giving an interview to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in which he described how he and the Clerk had read the emails.
(ed.note: 2:19 AM, 10/1/06 … What makes this even more comical is that, according to the AP “Shimkus, who avoided reporters for hours, worked out his statement with Speaker Dennis Hastert’s office.” Didn’t seem to help.)
So the centerpiece point of the Hastert statement this evening appears to have been a fabrication.
It stood up for maybe three or four hours.
At present, the Speaker is committed to portraying himself as a sort of Speaker Magoo. We’re supposed to believe that pretty much everyone in the House GOP leadership knew about this but him.
These fibs and turnabouts amount to a whole far larger than the sum of its parts. Even the most cynical politicians carefully vet their stories to assure that they cannot easily be contradicted by other credible personages. When you see Majority Leaders and Speakers and Committee chairs calling each other liars in public you know that the underlying story is very bad, that the system of coordination and hierarchy has broken down and that each player believes he’s in a fight for his life.
