During the height of the Foleygate blow-up, I had many more than a few readers write in to ask me why it wasn’t obvious to me that the Foley revelations were a Karl Rove dirty trick. Didn’t I get it? Didn’t I see how this Foleygate business had conveniently come along just when the NIE story and Woodward’s book were shining a bright light on Iraq?

I thought of dredging my memory for similar insights. But suffice it to say the examples would be legion. Indeed, there is almost no misfortune the Republicans can suffer that a non-trivial number of Democrats won’t be able to convince themselves was actually a fiendishly brilliant Rove plot.

Now, I don’t say this to beat up on my Democratic brethren. And I wouldn’t want you to think most TPM Readers think along these lines. But it’s not something to brush away either.

We don’t know what will happen November 7th. Elections can turn dramatically in the final weeks. But unless something dramatic changes, it’s going to be a really, really bad one for the GOP. Yet there are many Democrats who are convinced that Karl Rove has the matter all in hand and is just waiting to spring some trap.

Why do I raise this point? The last several years have taken a harsh toll on the country. But it’s taken one on the psyche of Democrats too. Look over time and geography and you’ll see a regular pattern. Those who are cut off from power and have the experience of repeated defeats began to believe that those who oppress them possess power and control over events all out of proportion to reality. It’s the experience of being beaten repeatedly which can warp perceptions as much as winning too much.

And it’s not just in the minds of Democrats.

I’m a big critic of media bias of different sorts, which I’ve chronicled over the years at this site. But a lot of the slavishness toward Republicans and contempt for Democrats one sees in the media, again, is the product, to put it baldly, of seeing Democrats lose three straight national elections. People without strong grounding respect power and have contempt for weakness. They inpute power and sense and sagacity to victory and all the opposites to defeat.

If you want some sense of how this works, give me an example of the losing political campaign that wasn’t run by idiots. Have any examples?

This isn’t just a cliff-notes version of social psychology. It’s an important element in understanding the politics of the last six years. Not just the Democrats and the Republicans, but the weight of conventional wisdom, how the most silly and outlandish gambits from the GOP get a respectable hearing while ineptitude and weakness are the favored storyline for Dems. To borrow a concept from Chinese politics and cosmology, since 2000 the GOP has had the Mandate of Heaven.

If the Democrats do really well on November 7th, yes, they’ll get the subpoena power that has the White House shaking in its boots. And the president’s legislative agenda, as we’ve known it to date, will cease to exist. But I’m not certain those will be the most consequential changes. After the last six years, it will have a deep effect on the perceptions of both parties. And with a party that has based on so much on bluff, confidence and force, that could be a very big deal.

Okay, while we’re passing the time on important and frenetic matters of late campaign note, let’s allow ourselves a bit of diversion with a contest.

What is the lamest incumbent member of Congress website? Not their official House or Senate page. But their campaign website. And only incumbents. If you open the contest to challengers, some campaigns are so underfunded and so nominal in nature that there’s almost no point. If they don’t have enough money to put together a halfway respectable website maybe that’s because the campaign doesn’t have any money and it’s not even a serious campaign. Any incumbent though has at least enough money to put together a half way respectable web presence. And lame can mean so many things to so many people. So let’s try to focus on flagrant cheapness, moronic design and other such characteristics rather than high falutin’ concepts of web design or interactivity.

Okay, with that out of the way, let me nominate Rep. Virginia Foxx (R) from North Carolina’s 5th district. Foxx’s site is pretty decent on general cheapness of design and all around lameness. But it was cheapness that jumped out at me. If you go to the “campaign photos” section of her site and click for 2006, you can see a little Flash player that breezes you through photos of Foxx pressing the flesh with constituents and also sharing a few quality moments with Rep. Hastert, who apparently visited the district before he became the national poster boy for fifty-something horndogs chatting up high school students.

But what caught my eye was the little trailer line cruising over the top of the pictures: “Created with the trial version of CoffeeCup Flash Photo Gallery www. coffeecup.com Click here to Buy Now!”

I heard Republcans were having a hard time deciding where to put their money resources. But I had no idea it was this bad.

Following up on the trialware ad, I stopped by the Coffee Cup website (“fresh software. warm people”) to see how much a copy of CoffeeCup Flash Photo Gallery costs. Apparently $34.

That’s pretty hard up.

But still. There are 435 members of the House. There must be worse out there. Send in your nominations.

Late Update: Wow, that didn’t take long. TPM Reader CL just nominated the website of Rep. Wally Herger (R-CA) and I think it may even knock Foxx out of the running.

It’s like sub-lame.

According to this piece out in tomorrow’s Post, one of the player’s in the Curt Weldon investigation seems to be “Bogoljub Karic, a wealthy Serbian businessman who had been barred from visiting or trading with the United States because of his close ties to former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic.” Apparently Bogoljub hired Weldon’s daughter to get him off the war criminal friends black list.

Here’s some background on him from a 2002 post. And here’s the dossier we pulled for one of the operator’s that had the Karic account before Weldon’s daughter picked it up. It can revealing if you’re not familiar with how the foreign lobbying biz works.

Right-wingers debate the merits of a “pink purge.” That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.

And you said no serious thinking had gone into our Iraq policy …

Embattled U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum said America has avoided a second terrorist attack for five years because the “Eye of Mordor” has instead been drawn to Iraq.

Santorum used the analogy from one of his favorite books, J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1950s fantasy classic, “Lord of the Rings,” to put an increasingly unpopular war in Iraq into terms any school kid could easily understand.

“As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else,” Santorum said, describing the tool the evil Lord Sauron used in search of the magical ring that would consolidate his power over Middle-earth.

“It’s being drawn to Iraq and it’s not being drawn to the U.S.,” he continued. “You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don’t want the Eye to come back here to the United States.”

Read the rest here.

Rep. Sweeney on a Abramoff junket to the Marianas: You Call This a Sweatshop? I’ve Seen Worse in New York.

As long as we’re on the topic of Rep. Sweeney’s (R-NY) visit to the Marianas, let’s return to a point that to some of you will be old news, but is still worth restating.

TPM Reader RT does the honors …

What no one seems to want to report is that Tom DeLay promised the garment industry in the Marianna Islands that the government would stay out of their sweat-shop affairs. DeLay got Abramhoff to get Mehlman to make sure the right guys were in control. That’s because the garment industry of the Islands had basically kidnapped Asian woman who paid a price to get to the United States for work. Since the Marianna’s are a US commonwealth, the garment industry can technically put “Made in the USA” labels on their products, but in reality, the garments are made in mediocre-paying sweat shops by captive labor who are also forced into prostitution and also forced to get abortions if they get pregnant. This is what DeLay, Mehlman, Abramhoff and company were getting paid to protect. Let’s get that story out, please.

All true. A hideously sordid tale.

Here’s the story of another member of Congress who went to the floor of the House on Abramoff’s behalf to denounce a teenager filipino girl who was held captive as a sex slave on the islands. This stuff isn’t just about misfiled disclosures and skyboxes. It’s real dark.

Helping steal the 2004 election wasn’t enough. Down by double digits and facing a career-ending election, Ken Blackwell accuses Ted Strickland of being pro-pedophile, possibly gay.

The issue of the day is Money.

As this article in the Post this morning explains, there are two debates going on right now within the Democratic party. 1) Whether to pile money into the most competitive races or try to expand the playing field to go after 2nd and 3rd tier races that may just now be getting competitive. 2) Are the opportunities in this election so great that Dem committees should be literally taking out loans to get money into those emerging races?

Harold Ickes, for instance, tells the Post, “It has been more difficult raising money than I expected. My sense is there is more optimism than is probably warranted,” he said about the Dems’ chances. (Ickes runs one of the independent expenditure groups that was supposed to provide extra money muscle in the stretch.)

I’m just an observer when it comes to question of political money and the brass tacks management of political campaigns. But I have pretty strong feelings about this one. The conservative, narrow playing field approach seems like the height of folly to me. In the grand scheme of things, the potential downside of pulling together a few millions or even more than a few millions of dollars seems vanishingly small. The potential lost opportunity is immense.

Stan Greenberg makes his case in this new post at TPMCafe. This one’s important. Give it a read.

The Foley sleazolanche has come down so hard on Republican incumbents, there’s been an effort on the part of candidate’s around the country to find any connections, however strained, to pedophilia or homosexuality. Yes, I know the two aren’t connected. But they’re often being treated as such. The Blackwell gambit noted below is one example. Here’s another.

Rep. Heather Wilson’s (R-NM) whole site at the moment is given over to a local TV news spot about a Internet-teen sex sting that bagged a 41 year old man who thought he was meeting a fourteen year old girl in the park for sex. The story is about how he didn’t get time but probation. Wilson says it was the fault of opponent Patricia Madrid (who is currently state Attorney General).

Take a look.