Spinning the Unspinnable

[updated below]

You've got to hand it to the Wall Street Journal editorial staff. They take their partisanship seriously. While fair weather Republicans like Michelle Malkin, Bay Buchanan, and the folks at the Washington Times are distancing themselves from the House Republican leadership in the wake of the Mark Foley scandal, the diehard partisans at the Journal continue onward, undeterred. To them, nothing is unspinnable, even a scandal in which House Republican leaders appear to have turned a blind eye to a sexual predator in their midst in order to retain control of a contested congressional seat. These guys live for the challenge of defending the indefensible.

In today's editorial on the Foley scandal, the Journal staff begins by following the White House's lead and describing the emails at issue as "a friendly, non-explicit 2005 email exchange." If you haven't already, you might want to read those emails and judge for yourself just how innocuous they are. I tend to agree with conservative Bay Buchanan, who observed yesterday that the emails in question "had predator stamped all over [them]." Moreover, clearly someone was sufficiently concerned about the emails to bring them to the attention of the House leadership. Needless to say, random innocuous email exchanges aren't usually subjected to such scrutiny. And Hastert himself admits that the subject of the emails was initially raised in the context of "things that might have affected campaigns."

But it's the next part of the editorial that really goes the extra mile and trots out what is likely to be the new GOP talking point on this scandal, at least among those with no shame. The staff writes:

Mr. Hastert was informed that fellow Illinois Republican John Shimkus -- who oversees the page program as part of a six-member board -- spoke privately with Mr. Foley, who explained that the email was innocent.

What next was Mr. Hastert supposed to do with an elected Congressman? Assume that Mr. Foley was a potential sexual predator and bar him from having any private communication with pages? Refer him to the Ethics Committee? In retrospect, barring contact with pages would have been wise.

But in today's politically correct culture, it's easy to understand how senior Republicans might well have decided they had no grounds to doubt Mr. Foley merely because he was gay and a little too friendly in emails. Some of those liberals now shouting the loudest for Mr. Hastert's head are the same voices who tell us that the larger society must be tolerant of private lifestyle choices, and certainly must never leap to conclusions about gay men and young boys. Are these Democratic critics of Mr. Hastert saying that they now have more sympathy for the Boy Scouts' decision to ban gay scoutmasters? Where's Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on that one?

Yeah, take that you liberal hypocrites. Had the House leaders investigated Foley, they clearly would have been accused of being homophobes. So in a way, this is all Nancy Pelosi's fault.

Good lord. First of all, when have House Republicans ever cared about coming across as homophobes? More importantly, though, what does homosexuality have to do with anything? These weren't emails between a Congressman and his secret boyfriend. They were emails between a Congressman and a minor who had been in the care and charge of the House page program. Whether that 16 year old was a boy or a girl, this still should have raised red flags.

The Journal staff asks:

What next was Mr. Hastert supposed to do with an elected Congressman? Assume that Mr. Foley was a potential sexual predator and bar him from having any private communication with pages? Refer him to the Ethics Committee?

What a ridiculous list of choices. How about option 3: investigate the matter further. Hastert and his fellow Republicans should have made inquiries, talked to other pages, asked questions. After learning of the emails, ABC News was able to get its hands on all sorts of other incriminating materials within no time. Surely the Republican leadership could have done the same had they so much as lifted a finger to investigate this matter.

But they apparently didn't. Now the Wall Street Journal would have us believe that the reason they didn't make any further inquiries was because they didn't want to be accused of being homophobic. Not only does that not make any sense, but Occam's Razor tell us that the far more likely explanation is that they just didn't want to know, that they turned a blind eye to obvious red flags because they didn't want to unearth a scandal and jeopardize a safe Republican congressional seat.

But I suppose the Journal staff has no use for Occam's Razor. What use are logical principles to those who make a living spinning the unspinnable.

UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt, the only person on the planet more reflexively partisan that the WSJ editorial staff, has come out swinging. His basic argument, which has already been field-tested by others, is that the decision by several newspapers last year not to run stories based on the emails somehow exonerates the House leadership of any wrongdoing.

Until Friday Hastert and other GOP Congressmen knew only what Florida newspapers knew and which those newspapers considered insufficiently newsworthy to run a story about. . . . Unless someone has evidence that Hastert or anyone else knew more than the e-mail exchange which two newspapers deemed not newsworthy, the demands for Hastert's resignation will become increasingly absurd.

This is a deeply disingenous argument. First, there is no indication that these papers didn't consider the item newsworthy. As this AP article (which Hewitt quotes!) explains:

The St. Petersburg Times and The Miami Herald, which had been given copies of the e-mail with the Louisiana boy last year, defended their decisions not to run stories.

"Given the potentially devastating impact that a false suggestion of pedophilia could have on anyone, not to mention a congressman known to be gay, and lacking any corroborating information, we chose not to do a story," said Tom Fiedler, executive editor of the Herald.

In other words, it's not that they didn't find the item newsworthy, as Hewitt suggests, but rather they couldn't sufficiently corroborate the facts and didn't want to unfairly tarnish an elected official. The papers did the responsible thing.

But the situation these reporters found themselves in is in no way analogous to the position Hastert, Boehner, and Reynolds were in. No one is suggesting that, upon seeing the emails, Hastert should have held a press conference declaring Foley to be a predator. What they are saying, correctly, is that Hastert and his fellow Republican leaders should have recognized that the emails raised red flags and shoud have investigated further. Unlike the Florida newspapers, the Republican leadership had any number of avenues of investigation at their disposal. They could have made inquiries, asked questions, discovered the truth. Moreover, the House leadership, unlike the newspapers, knew for certain that the emails were genuine. In short, the attempt by House leaders and their defenders to use newspaper editorial decisions as cover for their own inaction is nothing short of pathetic. It insults everyone's intelligence.