Fathers, Lock Up Your Pages: Mark Foley Will Walk Free

Federal prosecutors have decided that with all the killers, rapists and lobbyists clogging up our jails, there just isn’t any room for disgraced former U.S. Congressmen who tried to get all sexy with online teens.

In other words, Mark Foley is a free man…

Former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley isn't expected to face charges after a lengthy investigation into his lurid messages to underage congressional pages, two federal law enforcement officials told The Associated Press on Thursday…

They said neither state nor federal charges were expected, although an FBI investigation has not been closed yet.

Foley, equally known for chairing the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children and for typing the line "well I have aa totally stiff wood now" to a teenage boy, will face no penalty apart from being forced to resign from Congress, being outed to his family by Sean Hannity, and becoming a nationwide punch line.

The news will come as a relief to AOL, which has seen overall usage plummet, and may have faced bankruptcy without the traffic generated by Foley.

It will also be a relief to Larry Craig, John Edwards, Jeremiah Wright, Phil Gramm, Carly Fiorina, Geraldine Ferraro, Kwame Kilpatrick, Bristol Palin + Levi Johnston, O.J. Simpson, the entire St. Louis Rams football team, and Rudy Giuliani– who can all take heart that, no matter how bad it gets, there’s still someone walking the streets even more embarrassing than they are.

Sarah Palin Finally Joins the GOP Proper

Boy, it seems that this "Sarah Palin" character is in the news a lot these days! It's hard to keep it all straight – something about how she fired a state trooper because of the Bridge to Nowhere, which somehow caused Hurricane Gustav …

Well, one thing that's clear is that a bunch of folks are calling the evangelical Christian Alaska Governor a hypocrite for preaching about family values and abstinence education while her 17 year old unmarried daughter gets pregnant.

These pundits are forgetting that Palin is following in a proud tradition of Republicans being utterly hypocritical when it comes to personal matters. Indulge me while I rehash this star lineup!

- Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID), of wide stance fame, was a major force behind the military's anti-gay "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy.

- Rep. Vito Fossela (R-NY), who secretly maintained a second family in Virginia, was a proud supporter of the "Marriage Protection Act."

- Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL), whose political career ended in disgrace after sexually harassing Congressional Pages, once had this to say about Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal: ""It's vile. It's more sad than anything else, to see someone with such potential throw it all down the drain because of a sexual addiction."

And that's not all! The tradition stretches back years (don't even get me started on Warren Harding)!

So let's stop painting Palin as some sort of hypocritical outlier and instead as what she is – a proud standard-bearer of the GOP.

Roll Call: Yours Free

• With a special Forward by David Vitter and Mark Foley.

• McCain says campaign still intact, popular cat hired to fill in for lost staff.
• Fred Thompson to come up $2 million short. They're gonna take his thumbs!
• Bill Richardson's "grand strategy" on al Qaeda actually more "cheerio jolly good strategy."
• Edwards advocates "trickle-up" effect.