Of all the claims currently being advanced on the Foley story, the most transparently absurd is the one that says the story was planted by Republicans — who, of course, had just so much to gain by leaking the e-mails and such. Trust me when I tell you this has been a talking point on the Left for more than a week, since I received about 100 e-mails informing me that this was all an intra-Republican scandal.
Well, now we have definitive proof that the story was being shopped around by a Democratic operative months ago. The source: Ken Silverstein, writing on the Harper’s Magazine website. He had the Foley e-mails months ago and Harper’s decided not to go with the story. Key graph: “Last May, a source put me in touch with a Democratic operative who provided me with the now-infamous emails that Foley had sent in 2004 to a sixteen-year-old page. He also provided several emails that the page sent to the office of Congressman Rodney Alexander, a Louisiana Republican who had sponsored him when he worked on Capitol Hill….In the fall of 2005, my source had provided the same material to the St. Petersburg Times—and I presume to The Miami Herald—both which decided against publishing stories. It was a Democrat who brought me the emails, but comments he made and common sense strongly suggest they were originally leaked by a Republican office.”
Yes, well, as many have pointed out, Rodney Alexander was a Democrat until 2004, and therefore it is to be expected that some of his staffers did not cross the aisle with him.
Gee. I wonder where the story came from. Gosh. I just can’t imagine.