Word: pages
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...Still, my friend's cautious request for a wingman that evening seemed appropriate. We appreciated Foley's bonhomie and interest in doing business. But we wanted to just be friends. When I saw that first batch of e-mails between Foley and a young page, recollections of that spring barbeque left me convinced that the story would get worse before it got better...
...easy to dismiss the congressional page program as an antiquated, elitist form of serfdom. That's because it is. I should know - I myself journeyed to the Capitol a decade ago to become a Senate page. On a snowy January day, I moved into an $8 million dorm that housed a group of teenagers better connected than Jack Abramoff...
...hard to believe any of that matters. If it did, why has it been more than 20 years since there was any real discussion in Congress about ending the page program? The answer, of course, is that this century-old institution has now embarrassed the G.O.P. and House Speaker Dennis Hastert. Allegations that Rep. Mark Foley had inappropriate contact with male pages, and that Republicans in power may have known about the allegations long before any action was taken, suggest that someone in the leadership slipped up - and many believe the quickest fix is to get rid of pages altogether...
...That, to say the least, is flawed thinking. Shutting down the page program now would be tantamount to admitting the House leadership can't protect a few dozen teenagers in its keep from the most egregious types of harm. If that's the case, then why should November voters trust them on, well, just about any other conceivable matter...
...That, however, does not let Hastert and the others who oversee the page program off the hook. When I was a page, I did not know any Senators personally. Sure, Bob Dole once told me my shoes needed to be polished, I woke Senator Jesse Helms up from many a nap, and I watched on multiple occasions as Sen. Strom Thurmond pinched my fellow female pages' behinds. But none of these things happened far from the Senate floor, and I can't remember more than a handful of times in the Capitol that I wasn't well supervised...