I posted this last night, and want to give the flip side of the issue as prominent play as I gave the original arguments of Drudge and Passionate America.

For the past two days, a conservative blogger has ginned up publicity for his work outing a 21-year-old young man--a former congressional page and current deputy campaign manager for a heartland Republican congressman--who received sexually explicit instant messages from disgraced Florida GOP Rep. Mark Foley when he was 17 and 18 years old. I have received several e-mails from the blogger and readers flogging the post.

I refused to link to the blogger then and even though the Drudge Report has plastered screaming headlines about the blogger's scoop, I refuse to link to it now. There was absolutely no good reason to expose the former congressional page's name and identity. Seizing on ABC News' redaction failure and reporting errors (more on that in a moment) to play gotcha in a feeble attempt to avenge Foley is not a sufficient reason to obliterate the young man's privacy. The young man was the prey, not the predator.

Nobody is acting well here. ABC News seems to have made an honest error when it failed to completely redact the young man's AOL IM handle. That's how the conservative blogger traced the exposed man's identity. But in the wake of the Drudge pounding tonight, the news network surreptitiously edited its misreporting on the young man's age at the time of one of the IM exchanges without bothering to make clear it was a correction.

ABC's website now reads as follows.

ABC News now has obtained 52 separate instant message exchanges, which former pages say were sent by Foley, using the screen name Maf54, to two different boys who began their exchanges with Foley at the age of 16 and 17, and continued through the age of 18.

That does change matters -- and indicates sloppy work by the ABC reporters and editors involved.

But even that still raises some of the legal issues noted in the MSNBC article I linked below -- while disgusting and repugnant, Foley's actions may well have been legal due to the requirement of state and federal laws that obscene communication be with someone under 16 amd the whole age of consent issue. These matters could impact the investigations in an interesting way -- and make the Gerry Studds comparison more pertinant, as he actually engaged in sex with a 17-year-old. Is talking dirty to a page really worse than sodomizing one?