Wag The Tongues

by digby

Tony Snow had a bad morning. He was very upset at the suggestion that the white house might have some influence on the page predator scandal because the congress is a co-equal branch of government and operates completely independently. That’s a first. For the last six years the House has been nothing more than a Bush rubber stamp and corrupt money machine. Suddenly the Bush administration has no juice, huh?

Joe Scarborough just asked one of the most important questions about this scandal. Why was Tom Reynolds involved in this issue in the first place? Tom Reynolds’ only job in all this was getting Republican congressmen elected. The mere fact that he’s in the middle of this indicates that they were covering this up.

Here’s what Hastert said in his ill-fated CNN interview earlier this week:

REPORTER: Congressman Reynolds put out a statement on Saturday saying that he told you in the spring. Do you think he’s lying?

HASTERT: No, I’m not saying. I just don’t recall him telling me that. If he would have told me that, he would have told me that in the context of maybe a half a dozen or a dozen other things. I don’t remember that.

REPORTER: Other allegations of improper e-mails?

HASTERT: No, just other things that might have affected campaigns.

Come on. This was always a campaign issue for the Republicans and that gets to the heart of their problem. They were more concerned about keeping their power than protecting the pages.

Chuck Todd just pointed out that this never would have happened if Tom Delay were still around. The inter-caucus fighting we are seeing between Boehner, Blunt et al is a result of a power vacuum and I think that’s true — Hastert himself was always just Delay’s hand-picked front man, installed by him and run by him. When Delay was ousted, the organization started to fall apart. He was the organization. And it’s quite clear that George W. Bush and Karl Rove don’t have the juice they used to have.

(On a side note, supposedly Tom Delay was calling around yesterday trying to find out if any of his staffers knew about Foley and they told him they didn’t because they were too busy dealing with his scandals.)

There are many moving parts to this scandal, but the one that’s driving decisions so far — from the original revelations months ago until today — is the election. Whether the GOP decides it’s better to stick with Hastert or throw him over the side will be decided purely on that basis until it’s over. In the meantime we are witnessing all kinds of jockeying for power among the ambitious Republican congressmen who are waiting to pounce.

Regardless of what Hastert says today, Scarborough says he is a dead man walking and I tend to agree. Ultimately, I think they are going to need a human sacrifice in a scandal like this and he’s the guy Tony Blankley chose to be the one last week.

Update: Hastert said absolutely nothing in his press conference that we haven’t heard before. The beat goes on.

.