As the old saying goes, an incumbent politician won't quit unless he's caught with a live boy or a dead girl. It's a stupid saying, since it pretends there are no female politicians, insults homosexuals, overlooks financial scandals, etc. And yet...
sometimes it's true:
WASHINGTON - Rep. Mark Foley (news, bio, voting record), R-Fla., abruptly resigned from Congress on Friday in the wake of questions about e-mails he wrote a former teenage male page.
"I am deeply sorry and I apologize for letting down my family and the people of Florida I have had the privilege to represent," he said in a statement issued by his office.
...Foley's two-sentence statement gave no reason for Foley's decision to abandon a flourishing career in Congress. But several officials said the resignation had been prompted by the e-mails, and he took his action as fresh details emerged about electronic messages he had sent.
Foley, 52, had been a shoo-in for a new term until the e-mail correspondence surfaced in recent days.
...ABC News reported Friday that Foley also engaged in a series of sexually explicit instant messages with current and former teenage male pages. In one message, ABC said, Foley wrote to one page: "Do I make you a little horny?"
In another message, Foley wrote, "You in your boxers, too? ... Well, strip down and get naked."
You hate to laugh at this sort of thing, since it's serious for the man and his office, serious for the kid he was harassing, and so on, but with the extenuating evidence about this one, you can't help but chuckle a bit.
Foley, as chairman of the Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus, had introduced legislation in July to protect children from exploitation by adults over the Internet. He also sponsored other legislation designed to protect minors from abuse and neglect.
"We track library books better than we do sexual predators," Foley has said.
Sounds like he was certainly speaking from experience there, eh?
Labels: politics, sex
