Hide Your Children from this C-J Source

If you wonder why the Courier-Journal hasn't stopped trying to tar Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell with supposedly "smearing" Little Graeme Frost, the SCHIP poster child, consider the C-J's source, Matt Miller. This guy is no friend to small children.

Miller works for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee -- the group that is charged with recruiting and funding a candidate to run against Senator McConnell and other Republicans. Plainly, the DSCC has a strong interest in keeping the non-story of Graeme Frost in the press and in embarrassing McConnell.

C-J reporter James R. Carroll quoted Miller -- and his DSCC talking points -- at some length last week regarding a McConnell staffer who discussed with reporters the blogosphere coverage of Graeme Frost's family.

It's almost funny to hear Matt Miller wax poetic about the need to protect small children, given his role in the scandal of former Congressman Mark Foley and the Congressional pages.

After Foley resigned, a House Ethics Committee investigated the page scandal and learned that Miller, who was then the Democratic Caucus communications director, saw inappropriate emails that suggested that pages were being propositioned by Foley.

Miller could have -- and should have -- alerted Congressional leadership immediately, so that it could investigate and take action. He did not.

Instead, Miller "shopped" the emails to at least three newspapers. That is, Miller potentially endangered hundreds of pages -- children -- because he wanted to embarrass the Republicans before the midterm elections.

As the Washington Post noted,

Democratic Caucus communications director Matt Miller saw the e-mails as inappropriate, but rather than taking them to authorities, he shopped them to the press, first to the Miami Herald and the St. Petersburg Times that November, then to the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call. He also gave the e-mails to the communications director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, a point apparently validating Republican charges that senior Democrats were behind the revelation of Foley's conduct.

Miller was more interested in having the press investigate a Republican, Foley, than in actually protecting the pages from sexual predators. He and his fellow Democrats knew that pages were potentially being preyed upon, but they waited an entire year so that the story would break closer to the mid-term elections.

Perhaps when Miller accuses Senator McConnell about being callous to the well-being of children, it's Miller's guilty conscience speaking.