There are weeks when the capital is Fantasyland, a place of events, reports, and squabbles, perfectly understood inside the Beltway and mystifying beyond.
Consider the long-awaited report by the bipartisan House Ethics Committee issued Friday in the case of Republican Representative Mark Foley. It documented inexcusable conduct by leaders of the Congress -- and then proceeded to excuse it.
By the ``weight of the evidence,'' the report concluded that House Speaker Dennis Hastert and his top aides ignored information widely known by 2003 that Foley was stalking teenage congressional pages and sending them salacious e-mails. He had shown up at the page dorm drunk one night and drove away with two pages on another.
When Foley was caught, Hastert pretended to know nothing. The record casts doubt on that, showing that Hastert had chosen to remain ``willfully ignorant'' for ``political considerations.''
The report calls the failure to stop the predatory behavior not only an ``exercise of poor judgment,'' but a ``present danger to House pages.''
But here is where the fantastic part comes: Not ``every error in judgment or failure to exercise greater oversight or diligence'' is a breach of the rules, the apologists decided.
Not every error? OK. But to the man on the street, ignoring high school boys being sexually seduced screams ``error!'' Instead, Hastert gets to claim that the report ``made clear that there was no violation of any House rules by any member or staff.''
Read the whole column here.
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