GOP fights back on Foley with 'Chappaquiddick'
Congressman defending Hastert says he didn't 'leave a young person in the water'
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=52399Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn.
Frustrated by Democratic attacks over the Foley scandal, a Republican congressman hit back with a pointed reference to Sen. Edward Kennedy's 1969 incident at Chappaquiddick in which a young campaign worker died after the Massachusetts Democrat's car plunged off a bridge.
Connecticut Rep. Christopher Shays made the remark when Kennedy came to his state to campaign for opponent Diane Farrell, who called on House Speaker Dennis Hastert to resign, the Hartford Courant reported.
"I know the speaker didn't go over a bridge and leave a young person in the water, and then have a press conference the next day," said Shays.
"Dennis Hastert didn't kill anybody," he added.
Shays said if Farrell was willing to host Kennedy, she shouldn't be so quick to judge Hastert.
"We don't know what he has or hasn't done," he said of Hastert. "But she had a fundraiser for Sen. Kennedy, and we know what he did."
Farrell said her "jaw dropped" when she heard Shay's comments, arguing Chappaquiddick had nothing to do with Hastert's current situation.
She charged Shays "has taken the political approach first" rather than making concern for the pages his priority.
Kennedy drove his car off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island in Massachusetts in July 1969. The senator managed to escape, but 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne was trapped inside the vehicle and died.
No autopsy was ever performed to determine her exact cause of death. At the time, Kennedy claimed he tried several times to swim down to reach Kopechne to no avail. He came under fire for not reporting the incident to authorities until the next morning. In the interim, he reportedly made an effort to call a family legal adviser. Later, he received a two-month suspended sentence after pleading guilty to leaving the scene of an accident after causing injury.
As WorldNetDaily reported, a student at a Massachusetts college earlier this year shouted "Remember Chappaquiddick!" as Kennedy began a speech. The student was upset by an introduction of Kennedy given by a congressman who noted how the long-time senator overcame hardship in life on his way to success.
The Hartford paper said Shays' words reflected increasing bitterness over the political fallout from the scandal that saw Foley resign over inappropriate communication with male pages. But a new poll shows the scandal may not be helping Democrats.
About 75 percent of respondents to an ABC News/Washington Post survey taken Oct. 5 to 8 didn't think Democrats would have handled the Foley situation any better. About two-thirds thought the Democrats' pursuit of the issue was motivated by political gain.
Another survey, by the Pew Research Center Sept. 21 to Oct. 4, showed no gain in the margin by which voters preferred Democrats to Republicans, 13 percentage points.
In fact, the job approval of Republican leaders went up one point after Foley resigned, to 34 percent.
As WND reported yesterday, Harper's magazine revealed a Democratic operative shopped around the Foley one year ago. Reporter Ken Silverstein said that in May he received copies of the now-infamous e-mail exchanges between Foley and a 16-year-old page. Last fall, he said, the same source gave copies to the St. Petersburg Times and possibly the Miami Herald.
As WND reported, a radical homosexual activist who has claimed some of the credit for revealing Foley's behavior and has warned there is more to come, stating on his website earlier this year he would "out" a "gay" Republican senator during the run-up to the mid-term elections.
"Ladies and Gentlemen ... if they want a cultural war, I'll give them a f------ cultural war. Fasten your seatbelts, it's gonna be a bumpy 2006," wrote Mike Rogers on his weblog in January.
Rogers helped develop a "target list" of 20 lawmakers and Capitol Hill staffers he believed were hiding their sexual orientation while promoting an "anti-gay" political agenda. The list included Foley and Democratic Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland
Rogers claimed that before the Foley story broke, he shared information about the congressman with Bill Burton, the director of communications for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. WND spoke with a Burton assistant, but the director did not respond to a request for comment.
