Yesterday I outlined the peculiar and suspicious genesis of the Foley matter which is the Dem—Media's scandal of the day.

Now Speaker Hastert has asked for an investigation by the Department of Justice, while Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is asking for a House Ethics Committee investigation  to find out what the Republican House leadership knew and when they knew it. (Not very original is it?)

She's insisting the Republican leadership be placed under oath, and suggesting that by failing to act earlier they endangered children.

I think there should be an investigation, but the subject of it should not be the Republican leadership which —— like the newspaper which had the comparatively mild emails between Foley and a former page  ——  could not investigate further because the parents of the 16 year old  who had initiated the correspondence wanted to protect his privacy. These emails, which led to a warning to pages to keep a certain distance from Foley, were of a far different character than the explicit IM messages, which were only revealed to the House leadership after appearing in the press.

Once the House leadership was appraised of the incriminating messages, Foley was in effect cashiered out.

The important matter requiring investigation is how a  recently—created anonymous blogger got the email correspondence which the boy's parents had insisted be kept quiet. And how the blog site, which had virtually no posts and no traffic suddenly caught the attention of Foley's opponent who immediately asked for an investigation.

How it is that ABC ran with a story based on this blog when a year earlier even the BDS—afflicted Daily Kos rejected as improbable the story that Foley was a predatory troller of interns.

Is it at all believable that overnight after ABC broadcast and published the innocuous email correspondence it was suddenly sent years—old, salacious Instant Messages purportedly between Foley and men (ages and identities not disclosed)? Why were these IM messages ready to be sent off and published at a moment's notice?

Is it believable that Brian Ross, who has written so many stories that didn't hold up —— including his insistent claim that Speaker Hastert was under DoJ investigation in the face of vehement denials from both Hastert and the DoJ —— would write a fair account of the incident?

Is it believable that Soros' C.R.E.W. did not share the email correspondence it had with ABC, and time the release of them and the announcement that they had forwarded them to the FBI for investigation, to coincide with the ABC story?  The IM's carried the far more salacious content, and their provenance is still murky. When and how did C.R.E.W. come into possession of the IM's, and when did they contact the FBI?

The timing of the two—step release is critical to the political efficaciousness of the operation. The public is being led to conflate the different sets of correspondence (mildly inappropriate emails versus salacious IM messages), leading most people to believe the sexually explicit stuff was what Hastert had seen.

All that the House leadership saw was 'overly friendly' emails. No smoking gun, but cause for concern. Had the leadership done more at the time, it might well have been accused of launching a witch hunt on the flimsy basis of too—friendly emails. This is perfect bait for Democrats anxious to portray Republicans as prudes obsessed with homosexuality and willing to launch attacks on anyone even remotely suspected of deviating from their uptight norms. Imagine the Saturday Night Live skits.

Keep in mind that Democrat Rep. Gerry Studds was re—elected five times to the House after acknowledging a sexual relationship with a male page who was a minor, receiving a censure from the House (not expulsion, as was demanded by Newt Gingrich, but voted down by the Democrat majority). The Democrats did not demand his resignation for conduct far more serious than the emails seen by the GOP leadership, and even the salacious IM's.

Note that this 2—step pattern of conflation is similar to what we saw in the Plame case, where Joseph Wilson was interviewed as an anonymous source for 2 stories which made very sensational charges. He then wrote a far more muted Op Ed for the New York Times. The result was that everyone read the three pieces together, lending weight and audience to the sensationalism of the anonymously—sourced material, and allowing Wilson later to deny what had only appeared under cover of anonymity.

Can you conceive of why the leadership would have deliberately sat on something scandalous like the IM messages in 2005, knowing it could break in the following election year? I can't. But unless you pay very close attention to press reports, that is the impression you get from the media coverage.

On the other hand, given all the circumstances I can easily see that people who are power hungry could have come into possession of salacious correspondence which might affect the Republican leadership's decision not to act against a member on the basis of all they had —— simply 'overly friendly' correspondence —— and hold it to make it public five weeks prior to the election. If this scenario is true, we have a most amateurishly implausible route, via an anonymous blog, taken to launder the information chain, and  hide the fact that it was they, not their opponents, who cared not at all for the welfare of the pages and interns on the Hill.

Think that's harsh?

Consider this helpful summary from Gateway Pundit when deciding which party has demonstrated a greater concern for protecting the young people who work in the Capitol:

Representative Foley did not have sex with the minor, did not have sex with the young man in the Oval office, did not put him in a high level security position  he was not qualified to handle after a major terrorist attack on the country, was not married at the time, did not run a prostitution ring from his apartment, did not turn his back on Congress when he was accused of having sex with a minor, did not run and get re—elected several times  in a democratic stronghold after this news broke, Representative Foley no longer sits in Congress,   and the page did not disappear and end up dead after an ongoing relationship with Representative Foley...

For those  concerned 'quite rightly' about the mud slinging that  has begun and will continue for the weeks leading up to the election, I have a very good suggestion:

Stop listening to the news. It's going to be all trash. The Democrats know that you will not vote for a party with no program and no probity if you think about it, so they and their media enablers will be running round the clock smoke and mirror sideshows to distract you from thinking rationally.

Or you can ignore me, and fall for such dubious smears. In which case you can count on every election for the rest of your life getting sleazier and sleazier until only a handful of diehards will bother to vote. Oh, and if you stay home from the polls this time, Nancy Pelosi will be third  in line  of succession to the Presidency.

Clarice Feldman is an attorney in Washington, DC and a frequent contributor to American Thinker.