No sooner do I make a stupid prediction…
Okay, I think it’s over. Tom Reynolds’ fired chief of staff now says he told Hastert’s office about the Foley problem two years ago.
He also says he’s ready to talk to the FBI and spill the beans.
Full statement here.
Remarkable how quickly this story is spinning around. Maybe the FBI has more leverage than we thought (how many crimes could there be in this story?) and maybe Fordham just wants to keep the buck moving so that he doesn’t end up as history’s goat in this scandal. Who knows. Any way you cut it Fordham is the last thing that the GOP leadership needs right now.
More analysis from Marshall on what the hell is going on:
There have been a number of signals through the course of the day that the last gambit of the GOP House leadership will be to blame the Foley debacle on a cabal of gay staffers who hid and/or enabled Rep. Foley’s behavior for years. The idea being that they are to blame rather than the leadership.
That may sound like a plot turn out of a bad novel. But with the times we’re living in I guess we shouldn’t be surprised.
Fordham, the staffer who just turned on Hastert, is openly gay, as is at least one other central player in the drama. Fordham’s word now threatens to take down the whole House leadership. So they’re going to throw everything at him.
I know that it seems like I’m cribbing most of my stuff today from better bloggers. Ordinarily that might make me feel a little guilty, but time commitments flatly prevent me from doing anything more that that and I would feel derelict if I left the sheer ludicrousness of the last 24 hours go by without comment.
***Update***
Drum asks about the political calculus behind fabricating a mafia of gay staffers who supposedly protected Foley so that he could prey on kids. It’s a fine question, the idea of a GOP infiltrated by a sinister gay cabal really doesn’t seem to help them much except to preserve the exalted victim status, but I think that he is barking up the wrong tree. There is no strategy right now. The GOP leadership is operating in a state of pure panic. Judging by their total inability to keep a story straight they don’t trust each other any more than they do the press.
Republicans are operating out of the amygdala right now. Pure fight (Reynolds) or flight (Foley). GOP staffers probably lashed out at gays because that rhetoric about a sinister gay agenda reflects what these people actually think. In a panic people usually say what is actually on their mind.