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Friday, December 7, 2007

Pages Gone Wild!

One remembers the huge outrage (read: no outrage) from Republicans when Florida Congressman Mark Foley was caught preying on House pages, among other things, asking them if he made them horny, as well as to get out a ruler and measure the length of their genitals.

But with a new page scandal, Ginny Brown-Waite and Shelley Moore Capito are so distressed that they've resigned from the House Page Board.

What's the scandal?

Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite, R-Florida, Friday said she resigned because she was angered to learn that two pages had oral sex in public areas of the their Capitol Hill dorm. The pages were dismissed from the program, but Brown-Waite said the incident is an example of lax supervision of the teens.


That's right. A page had consensual oral sex with another page of the same age. Of course, they got dismissed, but that's not enough for Rep. Brown-Waite.

"It wasn't kissing and hugging -- let me put it that way," Brown-Waite said. "It did go beyond that, there were not only a young male and female involved, but there were also observers and other page participants who were, let's say, enablers."

"This had been going on for months," she said. "Almost all of the pages knew about it."


That's right. It wasn't even depraved homosexual consensual oral sex. And she's outraged, just outraged! Ms. Brown-Waite, this sort of thing has almost certainly always happened, and the, uh, ringleaders got dismissed. Nothing to get upset about. I don't recall you calling out Dennis Hastert or Tom Reynolds or John Shimkus for covering up Foley's preying on underage kids, which was a real issue.

I'd like to close with some solid language usage from CQPolitics on Speaker Pelosi's response to this scandal.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Friday ordered an internal probe into whether proper adult oversight exists at the residence halls for the 72 House pages.