PAGE TURNERS

Long before Congressional Republicans admitted to having a pedophilic page-turner among the ranks, they put Rep. Mark Foley in charge of Internet oversight for children. Warned about Foley's page turning tricks and turning a blind eye, Republicans might as well have hired Heidi Fleiss to head up the Vice Squad.

Speaker Dennis Hastert, who had known of the immoral conduct, but mindful of the tight November election, elected to turn the page over himself and bury the whole matter.

Press Secretary Tony Snow downgraded Foley's folly to "naughty emails," and later a poker-faced Card spanked Tony's cheeks for the Snow job. Tony Snow reminds me of Max Headroom without the stutter, but I digress.

That Foley had crusaded for tough laws against sexual exploitation of children on the Internet is just one more example of the hypocrisy within the Bush Administration. Saying he was a sex toy of the clergy who abused him in his teens, Foley is now playing the victim. C'mon Mark, everyone was sexually abused by the clergy. "Separation of Church and Boys" had not gained traction back in those days. Get over it.

The party of George W. Bush is having a hard time finding the right people for the tasks at hand. Budget directors, FEEMA directors, intelligence chiefs, it's really quite scary. And the Secretaries of State and Defense are so scary they won't even speak to one another.

Meanwhile, underwater are the surplus, our military deterrence, our leadership role in the world, and the sorry sunken city of New Orleans.

Responding to Bob Woodward's revelation in State of Denial, that Chief of Staff Andy Card tried to convince the President to dump the Don, the beleaguered Secretary of Defense fired back that he had submitted his resignation twice to the President, only to have it rejected each time.

Things are pretty bad when your best defense is that you offered your resignation.

If only the President would offer his own resignation like another Republican president had done following a previous Woodward expose, All the President's Men. We've gone from Watergate to Broken Levees. No one would have tried to talk this president out of stepping down. He could do a tear-jerking farewell speech and fly off in Chopper One, to the euphoria of Americans and the world.

In Woodward's Book, Bush tells a group of critics that he would still prosecute the war in Iraq if only Laura and Barney were behind him. I say we put Mark Foley behind him, cover our eyes, and wait for the Representative to declare, "Houston, the Eagle has landed."