The fat lady is warming up to sing her heart-rending cover of "Denny Boy."



Just click over to AmericaBlog and scan down the page. Here's the current top item:

A senior congressional aide said Wednesday that he alerted House Speaker Dennis Hastert's office two years ago about worrisome conduct by former Rep. Mark Foley with teenage pages.

Kirk Fordham told The Associated Press that when he was told about Foley's inappropriate behavior toward pages, he had "more than one conversation with senior staff at the highest level of the House of Representatives asking them to intervene."

The conversations took place long before the e-mail scandal broke, Fordham said, and at least a year earlier than members of the House GOP leadership have acknowledged.

It is clear that when I wrote yesterday:

Do I think Hastert has known for a long time that Foley was a perv? Yeah. Do I think he covered it up for purely political reasons? Yeah. Do I think Reynolds and Hastert squeezed a fat 100k donation out of Foley in exchange for their continued acquiescence? Yeah.

I was at least two-thirds right, and the last part of that paragraph may be proven right pretty soon. (Hey, stop acting so surprised, I get it right every now and then.)

I said yesterday evening I thought Hastert's chances of being pinned to the mat were about 30% (Wrestling metaphor. Clever, eh?) But that was yesterday. That number just about doubled. Hastert's only move now is to start tossing his own staff over the gunwale.

Hark! Is that splash I hear?

This entry was posted by Michael Reynolds, on Wednesday, October 04, 2006. You can leave your response.