"At one point, he (Tony Snow) even went so far as to suggest that President Bush did not think the Foley scandal mattered".

Both Bush and Tony Snow are right. The Foley scandal doesn't matter. No Republican seats will be lost as a result of it. The main goal of any election season is to either gain power or to hold onto power. The only thing that matters to the GOP right here and right now is to hold onto power. They will do this by not losing seats in the house or senate. There are close races around the country here and there. Catastophe looms in Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran. Money and lives are hurtling down the black hole that is the War on Terror. In any other country, this would be a catalyst for political change.

But not in America.

America has competing 24 hour "news" networks that lunge for salacious, titillating headlines. It has a public that gets off on sex scandals. The GOP knows this. What better way to deflect attention away from catastrophic foreign policy, from domestic policy that is bankrupting us, from a lack of vision and lack of care for the future from an administration that is just idling for time until it can throw more federal money into the pockets of corporations than with a sex scandal? Particularly a gay sex scandal involving congressional pages?

With a news cycle that spends four crucial weeks before a crucial election obsessing over a sex scandal, no serious discussion of the War on Terror or of this administration's incompetence, arrogance and political corruption will take place between now and election day. And no Republican seats will be sacrificed. Mark Foley's seat will safely be passed along to the substitute candidate and Dennis Hastert will either resign Congress within the next 2 weeks so that a substitute Republican candidate can take his seat, or else he will resign as Speaker, but be re-elected to Congress anyway. There is no way Hastert will lose the election. Not in his district.

When all is said and done, Bush and Snow are right. Because they're in on the game plan. Distract and deflect with sensational sex news, all the while knowing that the sex scandal will not result in one lost Republican seat, whereas a month of concentration on the gloom-and-doom reality of what's happening in this country and the world may have lost them a couple of seats.

The GOP knows its stuff. Sex scandals are very effective at distracting people's minds. It's like a magician who distracts the audience while picking his subject's pocket.

The Republicans have been preparing this for over a year.