GOP Haggard

This is like watching the Hypocrisy Olympics: first, Mark Foley smashes the old record, then before the dust even settles, a new mark is set that makes Elmer Gantry looks like a country preacher. Actually, Elmer Gantry was a country preacher, and so is the Rev. Ted Haggard, whose country parish is 30 million strong. Apparently Rev. Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, has been finding time over the past two years between his weekly White House strategy meetings and his campaigning against gay marriage to have regular trysts with a gay prostitute who doubled as his meth dealer.

Foley self-immolated in a spectacular eruption of confession and then vanished in its plume of smoke, but Haggard's wants to celebrate in the end zone, prolonging the exquisite agony of his political seppuku by fessing up piecemeal.

John Kerry's reaction to this breaking story, muttered from the dark basement lab where Democratic operatives have sequestered him until after the election: "Pinch me."

Note to Sen. Kerry: just because Haggard has diverted attention away from your not-so-swift remark about US soldiers in Iraq doesn't mean you ever, ever get to think about running for President again.