A conservative “watchdog” group has a new twist on the Foley scandal: smear the Democrats and the media at the same time:

The establishment media has a double standard when reporting the sexual proclivities of Republicans versus Democrats, a media watchdog group found in a report on the Mark Foley scandal.

Over the past 12 days, more than 150 stories on Foley aired on morning and evening news shows on ABC, CBS, and NBC, the Media Research Center, parent company of Cybercast News Service, found. Compare that to 19 stories over one year in the scandal involving Mel Reynolds – a Democratic congressman from Illinois convicted in 1995 of having sex with a 16-year-old campaign worker.

“The numbers are clear and shocking: 152 stories on Mark Foley over 12 days, yet only 19 stories on Mel Reynolds over an entire year. This double standard reeks of political partisanship and proves how far the liberal media will go to downplay the sexual degeneracy of a liberal Democrat and trumpet the sexual degeneracy of a Republican,” said MRC President Brent Bozell in a statement.

The biggest difference between the two cases that these clowns are intentionally ignoring is that in the Foley case, virtually the entire Republican Party leadership was indicted as knowing about Foley and yet doing nothing. That element was missing from the Reynolds case. The “Media Research Center” conveniently glosses over the fact that this difference puts a wide chasm between the two stories. Had the Foley scandal been just about Foley, it would have gotten, at most, the same play as the Reynolds story. The story would have died out within days.

It’s the complicity of major House players which is the real story, and that’s why it has legs.