The Speaker Speaks
- Tuesday, October 03 2006 @ 06:27 PM CST
- Contributed by: filbert
- Views: 1,548
House Speaker Dennis Hastert, speaking about the Foley affair, appearing on the Hugh Hewitt radio show:
I'll admit when this first came out I thought the worst of Hastert and the House leadership. But, I've come around to believing that the Republican House leadership did what they could based on what they knew at the time. This includes going to Foley when the latest accusations came out, and telling him to resign from the House. A cynical person would think they did this from sheer political calculation, but it was the right thing to do no matter what the motivation.
Those Democrats who continue to try to make this an issue for the November elections are, at this point, engaged in the lowest and most contemptible form of scandal politics. They had better pray that there are no Mark Foleys among their number.
(The Democrats) think that this is their silver bullet that will stop us from getting our message out. The fact is that they don't have any other message except scandal, they haven't done anything on border security, they haven't done anything on keeping, getting the economy better. We have. We've got the best economy we've had in years, the stock market's great, jobs lost are down, we've got an extra $180 billion dollars in revenue just this year alone, ever since January, more than we expected to reduce the deficit. And we've done a lot of things in the war against terror, plus secured the border against illegal immigrants. So we've had a lot to talk about, a lot to do. We just need to get back on track.Emphasis added.
I'll admit when this first came out I thought the worst of Hastert and the House leadership. But, I've come around to believing that the Republican House leadership did what they could based on what they knew at the time. This includes going to Foley when the latest accusations came out, and telling him to resign from the House. A cynical person would think they did this from sheer political calculation, but it was the right thing to do no matter what the motivation.
Those Democrats who continue to try to make this an issue for the November elections are, at this point, engaged in the lowest and most contemptible form of scandal politics. They had better pray that there are no Mark Foleys among their number.