But Republicans are not guilty of hypocrisy here -- they immediately purged Foley when they discovered the extent of his disgraceful misconduct.

And if Speaker Dennis Hastert had dropped the axe on Foley earlier, based on what he was told about the initial e-mails, you can be sure that the ACLU, the gay lobby, and apparently indignant Democrats would have cried homophobia at the top of their lungs.

It's the Democrats who are the hypocrites. Here they are castigating Hastert for not taking action that they would otherwise describe as homophobia.

This should be a non-scandal because it doesn't involve the Republican Party, or in fairness, even its House leader. Based on the facts we know now, it involves Foley alone. Let's put the brakes on this rush to judgment against Hastert until we see what facts the investigation reveals.

The real scandal is the Democratic Party. As I point out in my book "Bankrupt: The Moral and Intellectual Bankruptcy of Today's Democratic Party" -- and document in detail in their own words -- the Democrats are unhinged in their Bush hatred, trying to parade under a false banner of being a "values" party themselves, and have no real political platform at all, except for opposing the Republicans on everything, most of all on the war on terror. And the real disaster would be if Nancy Pelosi becomes speaker of the House or Harry Reid becomes the Senate majority leader. Can anyone really see Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid as responsible war leaders in Congress?

Democrats have disingenuously told us they couldn't wait to make this election a referendum on President Bush's policies on national security and the war in Iraq. But they have done everything they could to avoid this discussion because they still have no policies of their own to offer on the war -- and they have even less to offer on the economy, which is robust and booming. They will ride the Foley incident as long as they can, but eventually -- sometime before the election, they'll have to give us some answers. Too bad for them. They don't have any.