Okay, lemme get this straight...

Seven years ago, the Republican Party wanted us all to believe that Monicagate was the Worst Scandal In the History of Ever. Everyone of a Democratic or progressive/liberal persuasion was expected to fully, completely, and publically denounce Clinton as though he'd been caught diddling five year olds on the Washington Mall, not tapping a 22 year old woman who had, by her own admission, initiated the relationship. I seem to recall that the language got fairly hysterical before all was said and done, what with all the people standing up on the floor of Congress to describe completely consensual sex between two adults as the sort of disgusting perversion usually only indulged in somewhere far outside the Beltway.

Right now, TODAY, that same Republican Party, after six years of power-drunken malfeasance and general misbehavior, wants us to behave as though a Republican legislator serially sexually harrassing underage pages is no reason whatsoever for anyone in their Party to take responsibility for their complete failure to handle said situation appropriately in order to retain control of that legislator's seat. Many, many attempts have been made to suggest that said legislator's behavior isn't against the law, because the age of consent in Washington DC is 16 (completely ignoring the law that said legislator helped to write, in which propositioning a minor for sex over the internet is a felony offense, regardless of age of consent), or that said behavior is somehow excusable because the victims of that behavior and/or the whistleblower that broke the story about it are partisan operatives (the pages in question all worked for the Republican caucus in Congress, which makes them Republican Party partisans, as was the whistleblower), or that the victims are somehow to blame for their own victimization (and have even gone so far as to publically identify one of the victims in an effort to discredit him -- an effort which has, thus far, backfired spectacularly).

Others have commented on this situation much more eloquently than I (see Pandagon and Glenn Greenwald's Unclaimed Territory), but I have to say this: I seriously doubt former Representative Foley resigned his seat solely over some vaguely naughty emails and some somewhat explicit IMs. I actually suspect that former Representative Foley tapped himself some underaged page ass and is now in rehab somewhere praying to whatever merciful gods exist that this fact of his sex life does not break until AFTER the elections. Because if it breaks BEFORE the elections, the odds of the Republican Party retaining control of the House will, I think, shrink significantly. Those odds are somewhat tenuous as it is, with the fundie lunatic "base" lacking the voting booth storming enthusiasm they had in 2004 due to the general failure of the Republican Party to undo forty years of forward social progress in the blink of an eye, despite the almost total failure of opposition provided by the Democratic Party. That lack of fundie enthusiasm married to a general dissatisfaction with Congressional misbehavior suggests, from where I'm sitting in the land of Pennsylvania, watching a number of entrenched Republican incumbents getting ready to go down in defeat at both the state and national levels, that a certain change will be occuring this November. The Senate is harder to call, but I think we might be looking at a fifty-fifty split, even with explosive sex-scandal related revelations, just because the Senate is only tangentially connected to said scandal.

I simply wish that the change was coming about as a result of, oh, I dunno, our fucking retarded Congresscritters blithely voting to invest the office of the Presidency with the extra-Constitutional powers of the military dictators so beloved of the neoimperialist whackjobs or, maybe, voting to reverse two hundred years of dedication to the right of individuals to demand and receive protection under the law and swift, fairly applied justice and, to, y'know, not be fucking tortured to death by someone who will then never be punished as a war criminal.

Yes, I'm very, very bitter about all of this.