I've been trying to cut down on the Schadenfreude lately, so I haven't posted about the Mark Foley scandal until now.  (If you haven't been paying attention, Congressman Mark Foley (R-FL) resigned from the House of Representatives yesterday after ABC News got hold of his icky (and in some cases, sexually explicit) instant-message and e-mail conversations with former House pages.)  And, to make matters especially ironic (in a delicious/creepy/anger-inducing/kinda-sad sort of way), Foley was the chair of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, and also apparently "wrote the sexual-predator provisions of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, which Bush signed in July", according to the WaPo.

Now the AP is blowing the lid off the scandal with revelations that the House Republican leadership already knew about the problem almost a year ago.  Apparently the head of the National Republican Campaign Committee was notified (why notify the political side, and not House leadership, right away?  After all, a Member of the House of Representatives was apparently acting as a sexual predator toward a minor.  Wouldn't that justify -- even for the most callous, hardened, family-values-spouting "compassionate conservative" out there -- notifying the people who actually are in charge of policing the House?)  And then the House Page Board was notified -- all of them...except for the only Democrat on the Board, who was cut out of the loop.

Wait a sec -- which party is the cynical one, exploiting problems for political gain, again?  I forgot.

Geez, iffin' I didn't know better, I'd think that they were trying to cover this up, not get to the bottom of what happened and stop a sexual predator.

And House Majority Leader John Boehner told the Post that he told Speaker Hastert about it this spring.  And told Roll Call he didn't.  And then called back the Post and changed his story.

Boehner's been a busy guy lately -- so many cover-ups to orchestrate!  From CNN:

Boehner blocked a vote Friday on a resolution offered by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi asking the House Ethics Committee to begin a preliminary investigation into Foley's conduct and the GOP leadership's response to it.

The California Democrat's resolution would have started an investigation of "when the Republican leadership was notified and what corrective action was taken," according to her statement.

House Speaker Hastert is furiously trying to cover himself as well. 

An interesting comment from Josh Marshall:

A number of the leadership principals who apparently knew about this for months have made two arguments -- a) that the evidence they saw didn't clearly point to wrongdoing and b) that the matter wasn't pursued because the parents wanted the matter dropped to protect their privacy. In the real world, I think those are mutually contradictory rationales for not pursuing the matter. If you're dropping the matter because the parents don't want you to pursue it, I think that means there was a problem. That also ignores the apparently criminal nature of the activity.

Looks like the Republicans on the Hill are desperately running for cover.  This scandal bears watching, and I hear that we haven't heard the last of this.

UPDATE:  Josh Marshall parses the Hastert press release, and connects the dots:

Basically, everyone's so mindful of the sensitivity of the matter they manage never to investigate what actually happened. Isn't that what they're saying?

And also, as luck would have it, the extreme sensitivity to the parent's feelings helps keep the entire matter hermetically sealed from Speaker Hastert.

So everyone's very mindful of the privacy of the family. But somehow Rep. Boehner and Rep. Reynolds found out about it from Rep. Alexander. And Reynolds mentioned it to Hastert. But Hastert doesn't remember. And Boehner told Hastert about it too. And Hastert said it was being taken care of. Only Hastert never heard about it ...

My question:  This appears to be involving multiple pages and formal pages.  The GOP response seems to consist entirely of circling the wagons and passing the buck.  Where is the concern for the victims?

At least, the kind of concern for the victims that the Speaker so forcefully spoke of back in July?

At home, we put the security of our children first and Republicans are doing just that in our nation’s House. We’ve all seen the disturbing headlines about sex offenders and crimes against children. These crimes cannot persist. Protecting our children from Internet predators and child exploitation enterprises are just as high a priority as securing our border from terrorists.

ANOTHER UPDATE:  Well, now the House GOP leaders are calling for a criminal investigation into Foley.  If they knew about this for the better part of the year, what does it say about them that they're only looking into the situation now, when public disclosure forces them to?

STILL ANOTHER UPDATE:  More from Josh Marshall:

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. . .

[T]he 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.

Indeed.  They're in disarray and scrambling like mad.  They're in big trouble.

We haven't seen the last of this.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE:  Just the tip of the iceberg?

HEAVEN PRESERVE US, ANOTHER UPDATE:  Another contradiction surfaces:  Page Board chair  Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL) says he saw the e-mails.  Hastert's press release says he didn't.  Now Shimkus's spokesperson says he didn't.

What did the leadership know, and when did they know it?