THIS MODERN WORLD

Like I said earlier, the Republican leadership is now so politically tone-deaf, they might as well join the Connecticut for Lieberman party.

The chief of staff for Republican Congressman Tom Reynolds, Kirk Fordham, resigned after questions were raised about his role in the handling of the congressional page scandal, according to Republican sources on Capitol Hill.

Those sources said Fordham, a former chief of staff for Congressman Mark Foley, had urged Republican leaders last spring not to raise questionable Foley e-mails with the full Congressional Page Board, made up of two Republicans and a Democrat.

“He begged them not to tell the page board,” said one of the Republican sources.

People familiar with Fordham’s side of the story, however, said Fordham was being used as a scapegoat by Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert.
. . .
Capitol Hill sources say Fordham’s resignation was demanded by Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, whose job is on the line because of his handling of the page scandal.

Of course he’s being used a scapegoat. That much is obvious. What’s amusing is how this fits into the larger GOP strategy. What Hastert and Reynolds have insisted over the past few days is that they didn’t know enough about Foley to take any action and that there’s nothing wrong with their lack of response to the “sick sick sick sick” emails. In the face of enormous public pressure, they decide the best way to react to a situation in which they haven’t done anything wrong is to fire Reynolds’ chief of staff?! Doesn’t seem like the best way to proclaim your innocence, huh?

The most politically inept part of this latest move is the fact that their sacrificial lamb isn’t likely to look fondly on taking the heat for House Republican’s indifference to Rep. Foley’s sexual harassment. If Hastert and company think this is going to calm down the calls for their resignations, they’re in for a shock. Not only does this serve as a tacit admission that the GOP leadership didn’t do everything in their power to protect House pages, but throwing a well-connected staff member under the bus only serves to further alienate one of the people whose cooperation they need if they ever want to calm this situation down. Don’t piss off they guy who knows where all the bodies are buried.

As the Foleypalooza rages in America, life continues elsewhere:

1. Seth Ackerman has a post you should read at Maxspeak! about the shift toward pragmatism within Hamas, which the U.S. media has kept to itself because they know it would confuse us. Seth lays this out in excruciating detail in an excellent new article for FAIR.

2. Nir “World’s Bravest Person” Rosen has a new piece for TruthDig about Hezbollah. As with Hamas, the regular U.S. media has decided not to tell us these things because we wouldn’t be sophisticated enough to understand.

This would be hilarious if it weren’t so callous and disgusting. Rep. Thomas Reynolds gave a press conference today to discuss his role in helping cover up Mark Foley’s lecherous behavior. Afraid of getting stung with embarrassing questions like “When did you find out Foley had a ‘cast fetish’?” , Reynolds decided to take out a little insurance :

To their credit, reporters saw through his transparent attempt to hide behind children. From Firedoglake :

Reporter: Congressman, do you mind asking the children to leave the room so we can have a frank discussion of this, because it’s an adult topic. It just doesn’t seem appropriate to me.

Reynolds: I’ll take your questions, but I’m not going to ask any of my supporters to leave.

. . .

Reporter: Who are the children, Congressman? Who are these children?

Reynolds: Pardon me?

Reporter: Who are these children?

Reynolds: Well, a number of them are from the community. There are several of the “thirtysomething” set that are here and uh I’ve known them and I’ve known their children as they were born.

Reporter: Do you think it’s appropriate for them to be listening to the subject matter though?

Reynolds: Sir, I’ll be happy to answer your questions, I’m still, uh…

Is every political strategist for the GOP smoking crack this week? I know reporters are usually timid and ineffective, but did they honestly think surrounding Reynolds with children would make people forget that he’s been covering-up for a sexual predator? This whole scandal keeps getting nuttier and nuttier with each passing day….

It’s strange how the recent revelation from Bob Woodward’s book about the July 2001 meeting between CIA director George Tenet and Condolleezza Rice has followed roughly the same script as the House GOP clusterfuck over the Mark Foley matter. At first, everyone involved (in this case, Rice, her staff, and the members of the 9/11 Commission) insisted that the meeting didn’t happen. Then somebody sticks to their guns and insists that there was a meeting. The blanket denials turn into “maybe there was a meeting, I don’t remember”. And now everyone agrees that there was a meeting after all. funny how abeing caught in a lie can jog the memory. The only question is, as TPM Muckraker asks, why weren’t we told about this before?

The meeting was first reported by Time magazine in August 2002, in its mammoth report, “Could 9/11 Have Been Prevented?”

The meeting was an opportunity for Tenet and Black to brief Rice on the al Qaeda threat, Time said, something Tenet was reportedly very concerned about. The magazine said the DCI’s message was that he ” couldn’t rule out a domestic attack but thought it more likely that al-Qaeda would strike overseas.”

According to stories which appeared online last night, in January 2004 Tenet re-created the briefing for 9/11 panelist Richard Ben-Veniste, executive director Phil Zelikow, and professional staff for the panel. (Zelikow, who worked with Rice before joining the commission staff, is now a top aide to Rice.)

The meeting was reported again last week, this time by Bob Woodward in his new book, “State of Denial.” In it, he characterized Tenet’s message at the sit-down as: “First, al Qaeda is going to attack American interests, possibly within the United States itself. . . Second, this was a major foreign policy problem that needed to be addressed immediately.”

On the premise that Woodward’s book was the first time the meeting had been mentioned to him, 9/11 panelist Ben-Veniste told the New York Times that the meeting “was never mentioned to us.”

“This is certainly something we would have wanted to know about,” he told the paper.

When reporters confirmed Tenet’s January 2004 briefing with the 9/11 commission yesterday, the Democratic panelist changed his tune. “Ben-Veniste confirmed. . . that Tenet outlined for the 9/11 commission the July 10 briefing to Rice in secret testimony in January 2004,” McClatchy newspapers reported. But he wouldn’t comment further, referring all questions about the content of the report to Philip Zelikow. Zelikow has yet to comment.

It’s clear that the commission knew. Even if they didn’t read Time magazine, even if they didn’t search for news clips before digging in, they received a detailed briefing — staffers as well as Ben-Veniste. To date, no one has explained why the meeting wasn’t mentioned in the final report. Why not?

Well, as Ben-Veniste let slip in a recent interview with Wolf Blitzer, the Republican members of the 9/11 Commission have been covering-up the messy details for the Bush Administration :

BLITZER: So you the asked the president in the Oval Office — and the vice president — why didn’t you go after the Taliban in those eight months before 9/11 after he was president. What did he say?

BEN-VENISTE: Well, now that it was established that al Qaeda was responsible for the Cole bombing and the president was briefed in January of 2001, soon after he took office, by George Tenet, head of the CIA, telling him of the finding that al Qaeda was responsible, and I said, “Well, why wouldn’t you go after the Taliban in order to get them to kick bin Laden out of Afghanistan?”

Maybe, just maybe, who knows — we don’t know the answer to that question — but maybe that could have affected the 9/11 plot.

BLITZER: What did he say?

BEN-VENISTE: He said that no one had told him that we had made that threat. And I found that very discouraging and surprising.

BLITZER: Now, I read this report, the 9/11 Commission report. This is a big, thick book. I don’t see anything and I don’t remember seeing anything about this exchange that you had with the president in this report.

BEN-VENISTE: Well, I had hoped that we had — we would have made both the Clinton interview and the Bush interview a part of our report, but that was not to be. I was outvoted on that question.

BLITZER: Why?

BEN-VENISTE: I didn’t have the votes.

BLITZER: Well, was — were the Republican members trying to protect the president and the vice president? Is that what your suspicion is?

BEN-VENISTE: I think the question was that there was a degree of confidentiality associated with that and that we would take from that the output that is reflected in the report, but go no further. And that until some five years’ time after our work, we would keep that confidential. I thought we would be better to make all of the information that we had available to the public and make our report as transparent as possible so that the American public could have that.

So that’s the bipartisan “compromise” of the 9/11 Commission. The full scope of the Bush Administration’s lack of interest in protecting the nation prior to 9/11 wasn’t completely swept under the rug, it was just made “confidential” until Bush is out of office. The remarkable thing about Bob Woodward’s book isn’t just the revelations it contains but the fact that the GOP has done everything in their power to make sure you don’t hear about any of them until 2009. I wonder what other incriminating details the 9/11 Commission has been hiding because Democrats like Ben-Veniste were “outvoted”?

Here.