Springtime For Foley

From a longer NYT piece:

As word of Representative Mark Foley's sexually explicit e-mail messages to former pages spread last week, Republican strategists worried -- and Democrats hoped -- that the sordid nature of the scandal would discourage conservative Christians from going to the polls.

But in dozens of interviews here in southeastern Virginia, a conservative Christian stronghold that is a battleground in races for the House and Senate, many said the episode only reinforced their reasons to vote for their two Republican incumbents in neck-and-neck re-election fights, Representative Thelma Drake and Senator George Allen.

But as far as culpability in the Foley case, Mr. Dunn said, House Republicans may benefit from the evangelical conception of sin. Where liberals tend to think of collective responsibility, conservative Christians focus on personal morality. "The conservative Christian audience or base has this acute moral lens through which they look at this, and it is very personal," Mr. Dunn said. "This is Foley's personal sin."

Brian Courtney, a Republican-leaning sales manager attending the concert, said the Foley affair had led to "the kind of mudslinging one would expect to see at an election time like this." He added that he was paying closer attention to the "values and character" of the candidates, and that he would probably vote Republican again.

David Thomas, a father taking his family to the concert, said that he, too, was leaning toward voting Republican and that the scandal only reinforced his conservative Christian convictions.

Got that? This is today's evangelical Right. The more incompetent, repulsive, and hypocritical their elected officials become, the more they believe in the Republican Party. Bad is therefore good (and the worse the better, presumably) because it clarifies and confirms.

If Congressional Republicans had any sense they'd run naked through the streets of DC, swigging whisky, cavorting with hookers, and frantically instant-messaging teenagers. Via the Max Bialystock principle, it would do wonders to shore up the Base.