Three more come forward as the Foley Fallout blows down wind.

The only way the phants are going to hold the House of Representatives is if they move the capital to Las Vegas, and hope that what happens in Vegas really stays in Vegas. Reeling from defiant admissions that Hastert covered up for Foley, and then lied to the press just days ago about having forgotten - the FT reports that Abramoff ran cover for online gaming companies who paid millions. Only after Abramoff falls is legislation introduced to restrict gaming. Quid pro quo doesn't get much clearer in thus morally murky age.

Meanwhile the reason why an embattled phants are not trotting out the war, is because we are losing the Battle of Baghdad, and even Bill Frist, Senate Majority Leader and potential presidential candidate, is admitting that Afghanistan is nearly lost - even as NATO takes control of the operation there.

The solution to this in the view of the Republicans? Hunt for WMD in Iraq!

The word of the week has been "creepy". For a long time it is has been clear to independents and democratic base voters that the phants were crazy creepy hacks pursuing crazy creepy policies. The Foley scandal gives a face and a name to the sexualized overtones of a Republican regime which seemed to seethe with upstairs/ downstairs yearnings. Foley does not change the equation, but he does simply it down to g(o)^p=∫(e)^x.

This is more important to the phants fate than at first it might appear. One of the most important victories of the Republican Party was to convince people in the suburbs to vote their fears and their wild fantasies rather than their interests. Reagan won everywhere because there were suburbanites everywhere. Over the years the Reagan coalition eroded. One of the most important dynamics keeping it - and people like Rep. Johnson of Connecticut, who is a dead heat with Democratic challenger Chris Murphy - in place, was the evolution of progressive and Democratic young single women, into conservative and fearful married suburban mothers. Democrats hold huge leads with primarily urban dwelling young single women, but see this edge erode dramatically as those women grow older.

The exfoleyation of the Republican Congress, the bubbling gambling scandal, and the crumbling of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan strike that the heart of the argument, made nakedly by Bush earlier in the week, that the Republicans are the party that will protect you. The very knuckle dragging neaderthal qualities which made the phants project an undercurrent of loathsome lust, also made them seem like the kind of knuckle dragging neaderthals that would club the things that go bump in the night.

The Republicans cannot get this off the stage fast enough. To no small extent because it makes people face that the Republican base, the radical reactionary right, is willing to concoct Clinton conspiracy theories about Foley in order to preserve their own mental equilibrium. The problem is that every time the one of the Little Green Footballs crowd says the word "Gay" near the word "Republican", another base social conservative voter reaches for the barf bag, and decides to stay home. Nothing is uglier than watching phant step on its own trunk.

The scandal has overshadowed White House efforts to focus on national security and the economy. “If you guys write about the Foley scandal, morning, noon and night, it seems to me that -- the president was talking about things that matter,” he said.

But that is the irony. For 20 years sex scandals have been the way of getting political figures who were not vulnerable on the face of it, even if they were disliked. Tower, Clarence Thomas, Bob Packwood, Bill Clinton, Barney Frank all took their turns in the hot seat. By living by the politics of purient destruction, the Republicans cannot easily make the genie get back into the bottle. For years the Republicans tormented Clinton, trying to equate sexual propriety with political trustworthiness. The scandal introduces what Needlenose has called the trust issue as front and center.

While Nancy Pelosi does what she does best - fight in the trenches of congressional infighting, shooting down many of the most obvious ploys in Hastert's response, such as Louis Freeh's being in charge of reforming the Page program, Harry Reid has come out swinging with a very public statement:

This Republican Congress has now completely failed the American people. We knew they wouldn't stand up to big drug companies. We knew they wouldn't repeal the tax breaks they gave to big oil. But we did expect them to protect our kids. It is now clear we expected too much of them. They are not up to the job of upholding America's values.

“It is not enough for House Republican leaders to work to ensure this disgrace is not repeated in the future. Every parent in America expects them to fully investigate why it was permitted in the first place. The problem today isn't the page program, which has been in existence since the time of Daniel Webster. The problem today is that House Republican leaders had evidence of a sexual predator in their ranks and chose to cover it up instead of choosing to protect these children. What is needed is for Republican leaders to testify under oath about what they knew, when they knew it, and why they didn't properly act.”

It also has the effect of reincarnating all of the other scandals that have rocked the Republican hold on power, but have not shifted the allegiance of the press to elephantine government. The public has soured on the current regime and gives the Republican Congress Nixonian numbers but now that is translating into leads in specific races. There is no longer a vague angst, but a specific anger. Scarborough, former Republican who knows sex scandals from the inside warns that this is yet another reason why the public is going to vote Democratic.

This comes at exactly the wrong moment for the phants, and has given the donks a raison d'etre. In the last three elections, the Republicans have closed well, even if they had almost lost the election, when it counted they recovered - in 2000 it was after election day - when it counted. The same forces that gave Bush a breather and a slow march upwards - the easing of energy inflation as the economy slows, without the loss of jobs that will come with it - is going to come to an end as OPEC turns the spigot down and the housing market slows.

Foley has given a name to the voters pain, and forced all but kool-aid freebasers to face the reality that the Republican Party has lied to them, repeatedly, on matters large and small, on questions both foreign and domestic, about personal behavior and public policy. That this deceit has been in service of a carnival of corruption, and a debacle of personal debauchery. While the party of personal responsibility continues to hold Clinton personally responsible for everything, the public cannot feast their eyes often enough on Mark Foley, gay Republican sex predator, and the House that Flacks built coming crashing down.

The GOP has, in a matter of days become the Gross Out Party: Debauchery, Deceit, and Defeat. This did not happen earlier, because earlier people were not quite ready. Scandals don't happen, they are allowed to happen. Many of these revelations were already in place last year, but instead the press allowed the election to be dominated by lies about Kerry's record, rather than the truth about the Republican Congress. This time, with the Republican money machine wheezing to a halt, it is different. People were ready to hear about what they could feel, but did not quite want to allow themselves to see. It was Republicans who pushed the material out to the press, possibly disgusted by months of inactivity on the part of the FBI.

George Will echoes a common sentiment these days, the party that narrowly lost running against war and recession had better not lose running against defeat and debauchery. So the question that now becomes a tangible reality is what the Democrats are going to do if they manage to convert this chance into control of one or both houses of Congress. Because parties that back into power, have a habit of backing right back out again.