Thursday, October 05, 2006

Kirk Fordham Shown The Door

Well, it wasn't long after Kirk Fordham, the chief of staff for republican Congressman Tom Reynolds, went blabbing to the press that he was shown the door by Reynolds. The republican smear machine also started annoynomously telling ABC that Fordham in fact begged republican leaders not to tell the page board about Mark Foley's dalliances. Fordham's people told ABC that he is being used as a scapegoat.

There is something smelly about this chapter of the scandal and it is pretty difficult to get a read on it. One of two possibilities is probably the truth.

Perhaps the smearers are right. Kirk Fordham was a long time advisor to Foley and would have been in the perfect position to know of his former boss' predilections. Following his tenure with Foley's office, he left to take a chief of staff job for the head of the page board, Tom Reynolds. It is the perfect position to protect his former boss from, if he still held allegiance to Foley, which he apparently did as it has been reported that Fordham advised Foley over the last weekend.

On the other hand, Fordham is possibly telling the truth and would have been in the best position to get resolution to the matter and possibly told Reynolds and other republican leadership to do something about it which they did not.

It is however, irrelevant to the overall matter at hand, because whichever account is correct, both agree that Fordham told the republican leadership which did nothing about it. Whether Fordham pleaded or prodded does nothing to allow Denny Hastert to escape culpability on the matter as a whole. In fact, I'm not sure which version makes Hastert look worse.

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