I think Rodney Alexander, one of our Louisiana congressman, has shown that he like Denny Hastert cares a lot more about his political position than he did about the safety of any of the pages in Washington. Of all people, it's Ramesh Ponnuru over at the Corner who makes this point most strongly.

And don't forget that Alexander was in an interesting spot, having switched just parties in 2004 (on filing day, so no Dem could oppose him) in return for a seat on Appropriations. And hiding behind the wishes of the page's parents rings a little false. Let's take a look.

First, let's look at Alexander's account of what happened. Part of what was snipped from the article Mark put up yesterday:

"If they were only acting on what we talked about ... I just don't know," Alexander said. "I knew that I did what I felt like we needed to do."

Hastert said he didn't pursue the matter at the parents' request, which Alexander confirmed, but Hastert also said he never saw the contents of the e-mails.

"Nobody ever asked me to see the e-mails," Alexander said.

Alexander said he would have done more if he had known about the explicit e-mails sent to other pages two years earlier.

"We knew nothing about the instant messages," Alexander said. "That blew my mind."

But the emails, which just aren't that long or difficult to understand, are not innocent. No one who read them should have their mind blown by the subsequent IMs. Ponnuru's makes the relevant point:

"...there's also this, which hasn't gotten much attention, from the former page to Rep. Alexander: "I talked to another page that was here during the school year and first part of summer. Kerianna (her name) said that there was a congressman that did hit on pages. She didn't know his name. . ."

Note: pages, plural. You've got one page reporting a level of contact he considered inappropriate, another page receiving attention that seems inappropriate, and a third page reporting that a congressman was "hit[ting] on pages." Alexander's staff nonetheless said that the only issue was their page's wish to have no further contact with Foley. Alexander's staff thought that their page's wish for privacy should be the overriding concern. So Hastert's staff didn't press even to see the content of the emails.

Alexander just wanted it to go away, and Hastert obliged. Multiple firsthand reports of inappropriate behavior and secondhand reports of it being a pattern, and their first instinct is to accede to the supposed wishes of one page's parents? Someone needs to ask Rep. Alexander a few more follow-up questions. For example, what exactly did the parents request? Did they really, really ask that Hastert not investigate other possible instances of Foley's innappropriateness? That would be such a bizarre thing for them to request that I'm having trouble believing it.

For that matter what kind of threats have been made to the page recently? It sounds suspiciously like Alexander and Hastert building a wall around the one page's family to deflect attention away from their neligence and make it look like they care about someone's family.

<We now return to our regularly scheduled programming on the other, wetter part of Louisiana.>