Creep-tastic.

The AP reports:

WASHINGTON - Overseers of the House page program this week discussed a camping trip that Rep. Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz. took with two former pages and others in 1996 — an outing now under review by the Justice Department, a congressional source said Tuesday.

The House Page Board, consisting of three lawmakers and two senior House officials, did not have any new information beyond recent news stories on the Kolbe trip. The source is familiar with the discussions but is not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

The conference call Monday involving the Kolbe trip shows that the people responsible for the teenage page program are casting a wider net following revelations that ex-Rep. Mark Foley (news, bio, voting record) was sending overly friendly e-mails and sexually explicit instant messages to former male pages.

After a day of repeating over and over 'please, god, not a Democrat' we find out it wasn't a Democrat. I figured that if the Rovian Right had any dirt on a Democrat with regards to pages, it would have come out long ago, but you never know. Rove might have sat on that info 'til November 4th, then let "Democratic Pedophile" run 24 hours a day right before the election.

He still might. You never know.

But we do know that the only openly gay Republican in the House who was already retiring, will be facing allegations of "improper activity."

I don't know if this guy is guilty or not. There aren't lewd IMs and creepy emails circulating on the internet about Kolbe. If he is guilty, he deserves to face the repercussions for his actions, but if he's being targeted by a GOP witch-hunt because he's gay, that's reprehensible. Hopefully we'll get some details so that we can figure out what's going on.

The end result of this is that despite Bush signing a law destroy habeus corpus in the United State, the news cycle will rehash the Foley story with this new twist for a few more days.

Jim Kolbe Mark Foley Republican Sex Scandal