As I sit here, Mark Foley has just checked himself into rehab for, of all things, alcoholism. Which strikes me as very peculiar, seeing as how he wasn’t forced to resign from Congress for drunk driving.

If he’s trying to suggest that he isn’t a pervert, I’m afraid most of us will remain unconvinced. Heaven knows that when I was younger, I often got awfully goofy when I drank, but the booze never made me hanker after 16-year-old guys.

But I guess you can’t blame Foley for trying to bamboozle us. After all, he’s just another in a long line of creeps who have tried to blame drugs and booze for their creepiness, as if Martians had tied them down and forced illegal substances up their noses and down their gullets.

What I am enjoying -- and I must confess to this guilty pleasure -- is the sight of liberals pretending to be incensed over this scandal. It’s really difficult to get a handle on their position. For one thing, we know these lunkheads have no problem with accepting and even promoting the gay life style. They even push for same-sex marriages, opposing any move to codify marriage as the joining of one man and one woman in holy matrimony.

Inasmuch as their current hysteria can’t possibly be dismissed as homophobia – a psychological disorder that apparently only afflicts Republicans – the problem, so far as they’re concerned, is that the object of Foley’s affections was only 16 years old. Oddly enough, Liberals don’t usually take a person’s age so much to heart. For instance, when it comes to abortions, those on the Left believe that 13 and 14-year-old children are old enough to decide to have the operation performed without parental consent or even their knowledge.

But how can you not get a chuckle out of Nancy Pelosi, she with her gay San Francisco constituency, running around like a headless chicken all because of consensual homosexual activity?!

Others have already pointed out the hypocrisy of the Democrats demanding Foley’s head on a pike, and trying to use his fall from grace as a reason to replace elephants with jackasses in the November elections. After all, these people point out, this sort of hanky-panky involving congressional pages is nothing new. Back in 1983, two congressmen, Dan Crane and Gerry Studds, got themselves into hot water over a pair of teenage pages. In Crane’s case, it was a 17-year-old female; with Studds, the 17-year-old was male.

Studds, no doubt trying to live up to his name, never denied the charge. In fact, he and his teenage consort held a press conference where they proudly announced the sex was consensual and, by implication, first-rate.

Although Newt Gingrich argued that both men should be expelled from the House, they were merely censured. Studds showed his contempt for his colleagues by turning his back on them when the censure was read aloud.

Not too surprisingly, Crane, a Republican from Illinois, lost his bid for re-election the following year. Not too surprisingly, Studds, a Democrat from Massachusetts, not only won in 1984, but continued to win his next five elections until finally deciding to retire in 1996!

What we sometimes tend to overlook is that congress is not only a legislative body, but a term for sexual intercourse. Keeping that in mind, perhaps it would be a good idea to eliminate pages altogether. Obviously their ranks are rife with shameless hussies of both genders just looking to lead our innocent lawmakers down the primrose path.

In the final analysis, bedfellows, we discover once again, make for strange politics.