The WaPo Washington Times has an op ed posted this morning demanding Speaker Hasterts resignation.

Sister Toldjah asks:  Should he?

I will take it a step farther and challenge the premise on its foundation.  I see nothing the Speaker has done or has not done to justify this, unless it is just for the partisan advantage of the Democrats.

Why?  Because at this point and according to the information at hand, the Speaker only knew about the emails, not the Instant messages.

The emails are important because unless they are validated at a server level then remain the only proof of this incident aside from Foley’s public acknowledgment, and at their foundation they are harmless.

According to this sidebar at MSNBC:

Federal officials familiar with the very early assessment of the Mark Foley e-mails say that at this point, there’s no clear indication that federal laws were violated.

The law that might be involved is the prohibition on "enticement," which makes it a crime to use any interstate means of communication to entice minors to engage in any sexual act.  But it as a relatively high threshold for prosecution — the communication must explicitly propose a sexual act.  The initial assessment, and it’s a very early read, is that none of the e-mails that have been made public meet that test.

Ok, schools and guns are supposed to be a no brainer.  No guns.  Zero Tolerance.  We suspend a 5 year old who brings in a GI Joe pistol the size of a quarter.  Well done.

And yet, despite out rules, look what has happened lately?

When the news first broke I insisted on taking a wait and see attitude because something just didn’t seem right about it, and too much info was second hand and unsupported.

Granted the guy resigned, which leads one to assume guilt, but scandal and guilt are not always connected.  So did he bail to avoid a deeper scandal or out of shame?  Only he knows. 

Let me stop for a minute and say without qualification that if the allegations are true, he needs help.  A 50 something guys should not be flirting around with a 16/17 year old kid.  Not to mention that as an elected official, and the kid a page this is a classic case of conflict of interest and abuse of position even in the best of circumstances.

It is also a representation of the predatory culture that crosses all boundaries, with the only common element the ease of access the Internet provides.

Let’s unravel it.  What first broke was a claim that he had sent several emails to a former page too personal to a

Sixteen-Year-Old Who Worked as Capitol Hill Page Concerned About E-mail Exchange with Congressman