Mark Your Calendars

Bay Buchanan and I agree.

I know one thing: that e-mail they call an “overly friendly e-mail” that had predator stamped all over it. No one in this country can suggest otherwise. You’re in a leadership position. You have a colleague you know is at least a potential predator and we have the pages coming through his office every day? They had an obligation, that same day, to investigate him further, to call in the FBI, if that was an appropriate action and also to call in those pages and make certain every one of them was interviewed to see if there is any problems here that goes deeper than what they already knew. They failed the parents of this country is what they did.

It’s completely idiotic to think that any reasonable person would have read those emails—what stuff do you like to do? send me a pic—and concluded that there wasn’t something icky going on. Let’s be realistic: What the GOP leadership concluded was that they weren’t bad enough that it was worth damaging their electoral chances by opening an investigation. They consciously decided to protect their own asses instead of protecting kids.

One other thing that’s seriously irritating me at the moment: Is no one else (and especially no one in the media) willing to take a long, hard look at how the GOP is categorizing those emails—“Naughty.” “Overly friendly.”—and ask them, point-blank, so you actually feel it’s okay for your Congressional members to be “naughty” and “overly friendly” with teenagers? They’re not saying the emails were innocuous, after all; they’re saying that they were outside the realm of totally acceptable, but, at the same time, that they were acceptable enough that they didn’t warrant an investigation. They might as well laugh it off with a “Boys will be boys,” because that’s the precise equivalent. “Yeah, it’s bad, but hey—dudes are incorrigible. Whaddaya gonna do?”

And, for some reason, that’s being treated as more acceptable than flatly admitting that they just didn’t want to risk electoral defeat.