Foley Fallout

I'm amazed at how far the fallout over Mark Foley has gone. Many Republican leaders have been implicated with significant amounts of knowledge or fairly strong suspicions about Foley's behavior -- including Dennis Hastert, the Speaker of the House. President Bush's defense of Speaker Hastert sounds a whole lot like "You're doing a great job, Brownie." A lot of people who, like me, were recently quite confident that the GOP would retain control of Congress now think that at minimum, the House is in play and there is a reasonable chance that we're looking at a Speaker of the House from California.

Could this really be so? And if it is, it's hardly a good thing. Are clueless Republicans muddling through a pro-oil, pro-religion agenda to please their base and demonstrate complisiance with their President preferable to even-more-clueless Democrats muddling through a massively confused and directionless agenda, fighting the Administration for no good reason other than to fight? There seems to be no winning.