October Surprise! Mark Foley, Chairman of the House Exploited Children Caucus. No really, I'm serious

With everyone's wagers now cast as to how many days or hours Dennis Hastert has left before being forced to resign, and whether John Boehner or Tom Reynolds will beat him to it, what is left to be said now of Mark Foley. (Glenn Greenwald has really gone to town on this.)

The only surprising thing about this story is that anyone is still surprised that there is any vice the Republican legislature is not willing to foster and cover up among their supremely hypocritical ranks, and turn around and pretend they are the world's great crusaders against that vice.

From the GOP's perspective, it's pretty bad when their scandals are breaking so fast that they actually get relief from attention on Condie Rice being contradicted by her own State Department about being warned, in the summer of 2001, in the gravest terms, by George Tenet and Cofer Black, about an imminent al Qaeda attack - but that relief only coming at the price of apparently an even more damaging scandal.

The depressing thing about this story is that a House leadership cover-up about one of their own members sexually harrassing and exploiting underage victims, as serious as that is, generates a lot more public outrage than the passage of the "Military Commissions Act" by the House the day before the Foley scandal broke.

The exciting thing about this story is that, over the following days and weeks, more and more information may be coming out about how far Foley's crimes went, and how many of his fellow GOP congressmen knew all about it and kept it hush-hush to avoid political damage, and potentially even conspired to cover it up as an ongoing concern, exposing them not just to political fallout but also to criminal liability - so that, out of this strange tragedy, America can shake off its corrupt Republican masters and get back to being American.

The gleeful thing, the schadenfreude, about this story will be watching all the Republicans keep contradicting each other and then turn on each other and come out with more and more stories to shift blame onto each other, hopefully right up to cutting deals with prosecutors to spill the beans in exchange for leniency.

And hopefully the GOP rank and file will finally shake loose their tinfoil hats and realize that a party leadership that conspires to cover up lying this country's way into a war of aggression is going to cover up absolutely anything.