Emmanule Not Fit for Leadership
by KevinDecember 11th, 2006
Greenwald is right on this matter: Emmanuel lied about when he knew about the Foley matter, and that makes him unfit for a leadership role, at a minimum.
Obligatory troll repellant:
The tale runs something like this: People in Emmanuel’s staff got a copy of some of the Foley emails in 2005. Convinced that the GOP controlled committees would do nothing about this, that person tried to interest media outlets in 2005 in the story. No one gave the story coverage. Emmanuel’s aids said that his knowledge was “cursory” and so he didn’t do anything beyond that. Some on the right want to claim that “the Democrats” shopped the story for political gain. No, as the report of the Ethics Committee said, the one Democrat staffer who had the emails was convinced by the GOP’s abysmal track record of oversight that the relevant committees would sit on this information. And, hey, guess what: the Ethics committee found that the GOP leadership did, in fact, do next to nothing about Foley, despite having years of warnings by the time the last round of emails. More, the staffer sent the emails to the media as soon as he got a hold of them, in October of 2005 — not October of 2006, when they would have had the highest political impact. So the argument that this was a bipartisan scandal or that the Dems held onto the information for political purposes is an argument that only a liar or a fool could seriously advance.
Now to the important stuff:
Emmanuel failed these pages. No, he did not have all the information, no he did not have most of the damaging information (he wasn’t shown the actual emails), and no, he didn’t run the House and have the ability to launch a full investigation. But Emmanuel knew that something was wrong with Foley’s relationships with pages. He had an obligation to attempt to find out more. If he had pressed, he certainly would have seen what disturbed the staffer who leaked to the press so much, and who knows what he would have been able to force the GOP to do. The fact that the information came from a higher up in the Democratic chain alone might have been enough to set the newspapers investigating. Emmanuel did none of that. He was incurious about a matter that should have been vitally important to him and because of that, the GOP House leadership was allowed to continue sweep the matter under the rug. Emmanuel may not have done the sweeping, but he certainly didn’t do anything about all the brooms he saw laying around. And that is inexcusable. He should not be in the Dem leadership.
Categories: Politics |
Well, I may be a fool but I’m certainly not lying by questioning the wisdom and/or motive behind the decision not to confront/approach/raise-the-issue with the GOP leadership before surreptitiously pitching it to the media.
I bet the newspapers would have been more interested in the story if it didn’t look as if the staffer was politically shopping the story; don’t you think?