Let’s be clear about something: The House Republican leadership failed to act to protect pages from a pedophile. And, like so many things Republican these days, politics trumped good judgment and policy.

Mark Foley himself had to be talked into running again in 2004.

Now, you may want to believe that this scandal was somehow engineered by the Democrats to maximize the political damage to Republicans but

• there’s no evidence of that; the reporter who broke the story points out that his source was a Republican House staffer
• the Democrats wouldn’t have been a position to engineer the scandal if something scandalous hadn’t been committed by the GOP leadership

The second point is the one to keep in mind. If I wait to disclose my enemy’s embezzling church funds to maximize his embarassment, that’s bad. But it’s not nearly as bad as the embezzlement, for crying out loud!

Let’s be clear about something else: As bad as this is, it’s not the worst case of Republican nonfeasance in Congress, and it’s not nearly as bad as the many acts of omission and commission by the Republican Administration.