What are they thinking?

Can Hastert and Co. actually think they're going to survive the Foley scandal?

For the life of me, I cannot figure out what the damage control strategy is supposed to be on this one.

Lies, followed by half-truths, followed by excuses, followed by more lies. Wow. It is as though they don't even remember Watergate.

"It's not the crime that kills you, it's the coverup" is only a cliche because it is literally true, and because people keep forgetting it. The offense in this case, had it been properly addressed, would have destroyed Mark Foley and cost the GOP his seat in congress. The coverup, however, has the potential to guarantee a wholesale electoral bloodbath favoring the Democrats. Hastert is going down. In light of AmericaBlog's bombshell, Reynolds cannot possibly survive. How they cannot know this by now is beyond me.

The RWNM line is bouncing back and forth between "Democrats do it, too," "election-year politics," and "it's the victims' fault." It is just breathtaking to hear these desperate pleadings spewing from the mouths of people who have built their careers on castigating liberals for their supposed moral relativism.

The title of this post is a rhetorical question. The answer is, they're not thinking. The GOP is in pure, instinctive survival mode right now. The hypocrisy of the "values party" has been laid bare. There are no principles guiding the Republican Party. There is power and the single-minded determination to hold on to it. That narrow focus has blinded them to what everyone else can see.

UPDATE

As ABC News reports, Hastert really does believe this is going to blow over:

Speaker Dennis Hastert brushed aside any suggestion of resignation on Tuesday as House Republican leaders struggled to contain the fallout from an election-year scandal involving sexually explicit messages from a disgraced lawmaker to underage male pages.

[...]

"The speaker has and will lead the Republican conference to another majority in the 110th Congress," said Hastert spokesman Ron Bonjean.

Hastert really does seem to think that this is still about Foley.

Somebody needs to sit him down and explain that the scandal stopped being about Foley the second he went into rehab. The scandal is about the failure of Hastert and Co. to take action when they learned that there was a sexual predator of children in the Republican congressional leadership. Their failure to get rid of Foley was tantamount to encouraging him to continue his predatory behavior.

I'm waiting to see how long it takes Hastert to realize this.