Alcohol has long been blamed by many people for inappropriate behavior, but recently it seems to be getting tagged as the instigator for more and more specific behavior. When Mel Gibson was arrested for drunk driving, he blamed his anti-semetic remarks on the alcohol. Of course, the natural question was, “how could alcohol be responsible for anti-semetism?” The answer, of course, is that alcohol releases inhibitions, things you might not otherwise say or do–but alcohol does not create the urges that exist in the first place. Mel Gibson obviously has anti-semetic feelings; the alcohol didn’t create them.

But that’s not stopping Republican ex-congressman Mark Foley from trying to use alcohol as an excuse. I mean, seriously–alcohol made him turn into a pedophile sexual predator? Please. But I suppose that there’s simply not much else Foley can do to try to defend himself–as stupid and inane as the claim is, it’s probably his only best defense against an indefensible position. Though one might think that there is an alternative: confession, admission, penitence.

Sorry. For a minute there I forgot that I was talking about a member of the Republican Party.

Which brings us to GOP luminaries like Dennis Hastert, Speaker of the House. From what we know so far, Hastert was told specifically, and claimed to work on the issue, but nothing ever came from it. Hastert was told there was a member of his own party sending sexually inappropriate messages to teenage boys working for the House. Hastert apparently took no action against the perpetrator, allowing him to continue these actions. Someone told pages to steer clear of Foley, but it’s not clear that even that feeble action came from Hastert.

So what is Hastert’s reaction? Naturally, there is a three-fold strategy: I never heard anything about it (blame the staff), It wasn’t such a bad thing, at least when I heard about it (how could I have known?), and I demand an immediate investigation to get to the bottom of all this (blame those who should have called for the investigation long ago, hoping nobody will notice I was the one who should have done it). Hastert doesn’t even have alcohol to fall back on; he has to hope that he can kick up enough dust, create enough confusion and doubt, that people will give him the benefit of that doubt, believing that maybe he had never heard about it before.

However, it’s not so likely that Hastert will get away with this one; already, conservatives are calling for Hastert to resign as Speaker.

Other Republican politicians are having similar woes–Reynolds and Boehner especially. But Republicans as a whole will get hurt bad by this, as a party tends to be seen as an individual in many ways. I haven’t seen any polls out there which are post-Foley, but I bet they won’t look too great for the GOP.

What’s also interesting is the take on all this on conservative blogs. Now, were this to be a Democratic scandal, I wouldn’t want to post on it myself, I have to admit; some blogs are taking that route, like Blogs for Bush, which says that since they blog for Bush, and not for Congress, they don’t have to blog on this scandal. Which, of course, is a huge, hypocritical weasel, because their page is filled with stuff that’s not just about Bush; they blog on parties and congress all the time. A lot of the bloggers are noting that Democrats are taking advantage of this politically, which is correct, and I’m sure I would be just as quick to note were it the other way around; after all, if it were a Democrat who sexually targeted teens and Nancy Pelosi covered it up and allowed the offender to keep going for ten months, do you think that Republicans wouldn’t be making at least as much hay? So that criticism is hardly cogent.

There are a number of conspiracy theories out there, some of them blaming Democrats for releasing the information at the worst possible time for the GOP politically. If that’s true, then the Democrats have out-GOP’d the GOP, and shown a skill and acumen at political dirty tricks which is fully and completely unlike them. Not that it’s impossible, but you just don’t expect Goofy McDoofus to hit a beautiful home run over the center field wall after striking out so pitifully several dozen times. Rush Limbaugh is championing this conspiracy theory, suggesting not only that Democrats “got to the page and said, you know, we want you to set Foley up,” but that Democrats approve of this kind of thing and have “defended” it over the years.

However, there’s no getting around that despite the timing of the release of this news, the GOP was responsible for the actual events that happened–not that Republicans haven’t successfully blamed their own failings on the timing of the release of the news, like Bush did so successfully when his drunk-driving arrest became public just before the 2000 elections.

Another more interesting conspiracy right-wingers are talking about is that this is all the result of the conniving liberal media: that many media outlets knew about all this a year ago, but withheld the story until just the right time to screw Republicans over. Now, a general bias is absolutely possible, and maybe one specific media outlet sitting on a story (though to sit on a story this juicy for so long is highly improbable, considering the worry that another media outlet would report it first). But several separate news organizations all getting the story, and all independently deciding to incubate it until election time? Or, just as unlikely, they all met in a dark room and agreed to keep quiet until they could screw over the GOP? That’s getting well into paranoid territory. You can blame the media for not reporting it earlier, but that still does not absolve or take away responsibility from the GOP leadership for covering it up.

Lacking a way to smear Democrats as being “just as dirty” in the scandal like they tried with Abramoff, right-wing blogs are taking the closest thing they’ve got: digging back 23 years into the historical archives to try to refresh the last page scandal, that time involving both a Republican and a Democrat. Talk about straining yourself to share the blame! Again, a lame tactic, but there’s just no graceful way out of this for conservatives.

Say what you want, the Democrats come out of this beautifully. The GOP can’t blame them for any of it (their favorite default position), because the GOP specifically kept them in the dark about it.

Hey, maybe this is the “October Surprise” that Karl Rove was talking about. You think?

Update: via C&L, here’s a scenario for the October Surprise that Rove may have been referring to: having laid the groundwork for war with Iran over the past year and more, Bush’s people engineering a Gulf-of-Tonkin-like incident that would start a crisis with Iran. Scary idea, and hard to see how it would really work. Almost paranoid in itself–but then, again, we’re talking about Bush and the GOP here. Frankly, I doubt it–I thought that something similar might happen in 2004 before the elections, and that didn’t come to pass. Sure, the GOP is more desperate now, but I still think it’s a huge long shot. But, as I said two years ago, if something like this does happen in the next five weeks, it will be more easily recognizable for what it is.