Good Lord

Hastert is still saying he won’t resign, even as more pages are coming forward to say that Foley’s “special interest in younger men” was widely known.

"Almost the first day I got there I was warned," said Mark Beck-Heyman, a San Diego native who served as a page in the House of Representatives in the summer of 1995. "It was no secret that Foley had a special interest in male pages," said Beck-Heyman, adding that Foley, who is now 52, on several occasions asked him out for ice cream.

Another former congressional staff member said he too had been the object of Foley's advances. "It was so well known around the House. Pages passed it along from class to class," said the former aide, adding that when he was 18 a few years ago and working as an intern, Foley approached him at a bar near the Capitol and asked for his e-mail address.

Hastert retorts: “I understand that these are pages that have all left the program. This was after the fact. And you know — woulda, coulda, shoulda."

What an asshole.

You know, the thing that strikes me as completely bizarre about this whole situation is that it appears the Republicans actually started to believe their own spin about the “liberal” media. If Hastert “woulda” done the right thing and quietly opened an internal investigation when the emails were first brought to his attention, the media almost undoubtedly would have provided the necessary cover for them, as usual. In other words, not reported it—or dutifully minimized it by dismissing it as no big deal. Without the IMs to prove the case, any attempt to say the emails were indicative of a bigger problem probably wouldn't have gained any traction. But instead, the media uncovered the worst of it, the sexually explicit IMs, and the resulting cover-up, so now it’s a Big Story.

I predict, all his protestations to the contrary, Hastert will resign sooner rather than later. I imagine the only real reason he hasn’t is that his resignation will be a nightmare of its own, since most of the people likely to take his spot (I’m talking to you John Boehner) are neck-deep in all this shit, too.