The love than bores us with its name

Mark Steyn:

I'm a foreigner, so I might not be up to speed on how things work around here. But, insofar as I understand it after the last week, American politics is divided between: teenage pages; guys who are hot for teenage pages; guys who are enablers for guys who are hot for teenage pages; guys who devote inordinate time and effort to entrapping guys who are hot for teenage pages; guys who are rattled by guys accusing them of having devoted insufficient time and effort to nailing the guys who are hot for teenage pages and get panicked into holding press conferences where they announce the following:

"As the speaker I take responsibility for everything in the building. The buck stops here. ... That is why I directed the clerk of the House to establish a hotline for reporting any information concerning pages or the page program. As of this morning, the clerk of the House has activated the tip-line. . . . The page program tip line is 866-348-0481."

(If the clerk's not there, you can have him paged.)

The subtext of the scandal is this isn't just any scandal; it's a Republican Sex Scandal! (Cue the fireworks.) "Hypocrites! A gay Republican member of the House! The House leadership knew that Foley was gay! They didn't tar and feather him! Why Hastert is practically a procurer of pages for his pedophile friends! We're back in the saddle! Yippi-ki-yay!"

Meanwhile, in Iraq, the Secretary of State tells the Iragi that they have to get this sectarian violence under control NOW! The President continues his speaking tour encouraging us to keep up the fight against terrorism. Nobody hears him, because the Scandal and the demise of the Republicans occupies everybody's (in the media, anyway) attention. "The Dems are coming back and there'll be payback! Happy days are here again!"

And, with every press conference designed to get himself out of the hole he'd dug at the previous press conference, the 50 percent of Americans who pay minimal attention to politics (which, if there's any justice, will be up to 93 percent by now) caught Hastert floundering on the evening news and thought, "So that's the gay pedophile, eh? Disgusting. There oughtta be a law against it."

Well, there is. Many laws, in fact. And it's not clear any of them were broken. It's a good basic rule of thumb that no matter how bad a scandal is, the political class' response will be worse, largely hysterical and lacking any sense of proportion. But, even by those minimal expectations, this last week has been unbecoming for a serious nation.. . .

A few quirks of timing and the parties' respective roles might have been entirely reversed. Scandalwise, the Republicans always play the submissive masochists but the Dems are bi-swingers, happy to flay the GOP as either (a) uptight prudes or (b) pedophile enablers, according to what suits. What would have been consistent in both narratives is the assumption by the Democrats, the media and the Gay Page Tip-Line end of the Republican Party is that the electorate is stupid. In the sense that there's any "child abuse" going on here, the American people are being treated like children and abused by the politico-media class.

Will Washington be a fit environment for anybody by the next presidential election?