reality-based educator

From the Huffingtonpost:

On Sunday's The Chris Matthews Show, NBC Congressional Correspondent Chip Reid dropped a bomb during Matthew's "Tell Me Something I Don't Know" segment. "I'm going to be a little cryptic here," Reid began, then added, ""the Mark Foley scandal investigation is going to widen a little bit." Reid is referring to the House Ethics Committee Investigation of sexually explicit messages sent from former Congressman Mark Foley (R-FL) to teenage pages over the last several years. Investigation of Foley's relationship with the pages, as well as whether GOP House leadership covered up or ignored knowledge of Foley's attention to pages, is still ongoing and has included appearances before the Ethics Committee of everyone from Hill staffers to House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL).

Pat Buchanan said something similar yesterday on MSNBC about another shoe dropping in the scandal.

Whatever's going to drop in the Foley scandal, you can bet it's a Republican involved. If there were a Dem stalking the underage pages (or for that matter, trying to cover something up the way the GOP leadership did), you can bet the House Republican leadership would have already done their vocal best to get that news out there and make sure people around the country know that the scandal is "bipartisan" in nature.

So whatever's coming, if indeed anything is coming, it's going to be bad for Republicans. The question is, will it come before the November 7th election?

I have my doubts that news organizations will break a new angle on the Foley scandal in the last week before the midterm election for several reasons. ABC News Political Director/Wanker Mark Halperin told Bill O'Reilly on FOX News last week that

Members of the “old media” are too liberal and should “prove to conservatives that we understand their grievances.”

When O’Reilly pointedly asked him if he believed major news organizations — including ABC — had a liberal bias, Halperin repeated the right-wing talking point that the media is trying to suppress Republican turnout. He told O’Reilly, “If I were a conservative, I understand why I would feel suspicious that I was not going to get a fair break at the end of an election. We’ve got to make sure we do better, so conservatives don’t have to be concerned about that.”

Halperin isn't the only member of the "old media" to have internalized the bullshit wingnut criticism that members of the press are "too liberal" and biased against conservatives. You'll notice that Wolf Blitzer took extra special pains today to replay his Friday interview with Lynne Cheney in which the VP's wife accused Blitzer and CNN of hating the Bush administration, conservatives and America and defend himself against Mrs. Cheney's accusations. Conservatives are notorious for playing up the "victim role" and claiming everybody's out to get them and while that argument is mostly bullshit (sorry wingers, the only thing press people care about is a) ratings and b) money - that's why both CNN and MSNBC look like Fox-Lite so much these days), members of the old media have definitely internalized the message and will tread carefully this last week before the election so as not to be accused of trying to throw the election to Dems. Heck, the NY Times held the NSA spying story for after the 2004 election for that very reason, though they gave some other oblique excuse for why they held the story back.

So that's the first reason why I think the Foley scandal won't "widen" before the election as Chip Reid cryptically suggested it might on the Matthews show.

Another reason is that the Ethics Committee isn't going to issue a report or even an interim memo on the investigation until after the election and with only a few people absolutely in the know about the findings, it will be difficult for anything to leak.

The final reason may be the most important: Republicans CANNOT allow the Foley scandal to widen this close to the election without the party imploding on election day as a result. The GOP has seen some modest gains in some polls since the depths of the Foley scandal in early October, but if they take another hit in a sexual scandal involving underage pages or the covering up of sexual activity and/or messages to underage pages by members of the GOP leadership in the last week before the election, they will stand to lose 40 seats in the House and 7 in the Senate. They absolutely CANNOT allow anything else about the Foley matter to break before the election, even if it means having to commit murder to keep the news secret (and I wouldn't put murder past them, frankly - the Republican and sitting Congressman running for Nevada governor threatened the woman he sexually assaulted several weekends ago in Vegas.)

But we'll see. As the NBC Congressional reporter, Reid has a good idea what's going on up on the Hill. Buchanan may also be a reliable source on this matter because he was so pissed off about the way the GOP leadership handled the Foley incident throughout that when he says another shoe is going to drop in the scandal, he may want it to drop, even if it takes out people on his own side.