ABCNews.com brought Mark Foley's boy-chasing to national attention, but it wasn't the first website to flog the story. That dubious honor belongs to StopSexPredators, a pseudo-vigilante blog filled with plagiarized, hastily-assembled posts, which no one seems to have heard of, visited, or linked to before last week—and whose operator has a suspiciously savvy grasp of the news cycle.

In other words, a blog whose sole raison d'etre seems to have been to get the Foley ball rolling.

If its time/date stamps are to be trusted (like most free blogware, Blogger allows its users to backdate posts), the pervert-outing anony-site was set up on July 28 as a "clearing house for the public to report sex predators and as a resource for concerned citizens."

One early post, headlined The Sickening Six, naming and shaming the "kinds of sick people who hunt minors for their own sick purposes," is basically an amalgam of plagiarized entries from Crimelibrary, Wikipedia, and Answers.com. (Click here, here, and here, for examples.)

After running just six posts over the summer, the site picked up steam on September 21 when its author wrote, "the blog has been noticed and some shocking emails have been received!!!!" and posted four emails purportedly from "interns" outraged by the heretofore unmentioned Foley and his penchant for teenage boys.

(Of course, if these emails are legit, it means the "interns" somehow stumbled upon the blog, despite the fact that it had not yet been linked to by any other sites, and was virtually indetectible to Google, which ranks sites according to the number of incoming links.)

One "intern" wrote:

"...I came to Washington because I care about the future of America. I wanted to be around good and decent men like President George Bush. Instead, I feel like a piece of meat. The worst part of it for me is there appear to be plenty of my fellow interns who don't mind Foley's particular 'path to power.'"

Three days later, the blogger posted the now infamous "Emails from Congressman Foley to 16 Year Old Page!!!!", claiming they'd been sent in by a reader (despite the fact that they appeared to be scans of faxed printouts). Persons unknown then seeded the link to various political sites—including Wonkette, which initially dismissed them as fakes. ABC, of course, took them more seriously.

Whoever promoted the story on DailyKos did so only 12 minutes after the fateful post went live at 11:06 a.m.:

Six minutes later, the same person, again writing under the handle WHinternNOW posted the following:

Back on Sept. 5, however, that very same WHinternNOW posted a suspiciously more informed-sounding take on the congressman:

Whoever is behind the blog hasn't responded to emails from Radar or any other outlets, and seems to have lost interest in the site.

"I'm thrilled that so many folks are looking at this simple blog...." the author wrote on October 2, the last day the site was updated. "If you have any ideas that I should post, please let me know. I'm happy to pass along information about the current situation, but would much prefer to keep marching toward the large goal or stopping sex predators. I don't think we'll see it in the Congress anytime soon, so let's focus our energy elsewhere."

What, leaving the party so soon?

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