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Campaign 06 slogan: "But can you protect the interns?" Josh Marshall: Republican House leadership is "decapitated" by Foley/page sex scandal

I wonder if Karl Rove had a backup plan for this one: A top-level Republican conspiracy to protect a pedophile among their ranks on Capitol Hill, and *everyone* knows about it, a month to election day. Now that's a scandal for the history books.

Interestingly, the Republicans who claim they are so fucking good at defending America are totally incapable of defending their own teenage pages from predatory Florida congressmen on Capitol Hill. They literally cannot control sexual predators in a 1000-yard radius of the U.S. Capitol. These are the geniuses who are supposed to smoke the evildoers out of their Central Asian hidey-holes?

I want to watch the Daily Show tonight. Jon Stewart's head might explode from eschatonary total irony singularity syndrome (ETISS - the itis of modern politcs). One interesting consequence of this whole matter is that apparently the House Republicans are going to get whomped because in many ways, they are now politically paralyzed until the election. Anything they say can be flipped around to "But can you protect the interns?"

That whooshing sound you hear across America today is the moderate middle dropping out of the program. If this isn't the last straw, I don't know what it could possibly be. Hardball and Keith Olbermann should have a fun time tonight too...

I am reposting this chunk from the excellent political news & commentary site, Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo.com . This is the big picture, and it seems totally on target:

Here at TPM, as well as at TPMmuckraker and Election Central we're going to be devoting a lot of resources over the coming days to covering the unfolding Foley scandal. But I've gotten a lot of questions about the larger political impact of this debacle. So I'd like to draw back for a moment to take stock of that question.

I think it's a pretty safe assumption at this point that Democrat Tim Mahoney will win Mark Foley's seat on November 7th. But I'd say that'll be relatively far down the list of eventual consequences.

The simple fact is that Foley's downfall has pretty nearly decapitated the leadership of the House GOP with just five weeks to go before election day. And that's devastating.

What do I mean by decapitated? Let's assume, for the sake of discussion, that nothing else really comes out about how the House leadership handled this. No more shoes drop. Not a safe assumption from what seems to be in the reporting pipeline. But let's assume it.

Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-NY) is in a tight race for reelection and he's chairman of the NRCC, the Republican House campaign committee. He's in charge of the effort to keep the majority.

What's the number one thing on his mind right now? I doubt it's the NRCC or even his race for reelection. I think Reynolds is, to put it mildly, distracted right now.

How about Denny Hastert and John Boehner? I don't see them going on shows or making any public appearances for a while. They'll get asked awkward and possibly unanswerable questions about Foleygate. I'd say they're out of commission for fundraisers too.

And pretty much any campaign joust or jab at the Democrats from one of these guys, on whatever issue, will be instantly transformed into some sex-with-pages snark. "How can we trust them to protect America when they can't even protect the summer interns on Capitol Hill."

Just to give some sense of how these interviews are going. Yesterday, when Tom Reynolds was asked by the local paper how Rep. Rodney Alexander had characterized Foley's emails when he told him about them, he said "I'm not going to get into all that . . . I'm not into a grand jury witness thing here, or whatever." Well, don't be sure, Tom. The night is still young.

The one thing a pol can't brook is being the object of ridicule and derision. And at the moment that's about the best these characters can hope for.

Add to this the fact that in the final weeks before an election it's critical for each side's leaders to work together seamlessly. And what do you think the Haster-Reynolds relationship is like at the moment? Or how about Boehner and Hastert? They still trust each other?

And what happens when Joe Sestak asks Curt Weldon whether he's lost confidence in Denny Hastert? How does that conversation go?

The simple fact is that to the extant campaigning determines the outcomes of elections, the race goes to the side that can remain on the offensive most consistently and define the national debate on its own terms. Foleygate has made it very hard for the leaders of the House GOP to go on the offensive on anything relevant to the election. For political purposes they're basically out of commission. And they've given Democratic challengers in every district around the country a slew of questions with which to pummel GOP incumbents or any Republican, for that matter, who puts his head up on television. This is in the context of an election that was already going very badly for House Republicans. Foleygate has now made them all but politically defenseless in the final stretch of the campaign. And that is a very big deal.