Unless this USA Today article and the poll are a pack of lies, there's blood in the water:

WASHINGTON -- A Capitol Hill sex scandal has reinforced public doubts about Republican leadership and pushed Democrats to a huge lead in the race for control of Congress four weeks before Election Day, the latest USA TODAY/Gallup Poll shows.

Democrats had a 23-point lead over Republicans in every group of people questioned -- likely voters, registered voters and adults -- on which party's House candidate would get their vote. That's double the lead Republicans had a month before they seized control of Congress in 1994 and the Democrats' largest advantage among registered voters since 1978.

The plummeting GOP ratings in the poll of 1,007 adults, taken Friday through Sunday, come amid a series of events that have given Democrats ammunition to argue that the country needs a new direction.

Those include increased violence in Iraq; a National Intelligence Estimate that belied upbeat administration talk on Iraq; a new Bob Woodward book about internal White House discord about Iraq, and the Sept. 29 resignation of GOP Rep. Mark Foley. He quit hours after ABC News showed him sexually explicit instant messages he allegedly exchanged with a teenage former page.

Some Democrats call the scandal a tipping point. "It's the absolute crystallization for people of everything they dislike about Washington and congressional Republicans," Democratic strategist Anita Dunn said.

Except the election is not being held in my mind. The voters are exhausted, war-weary, and they want easy solutions. Now that Bill Clinton is taking charge, the Democrats have been smart enough to keep the left quiet (hardly a peep about "Indigenous People's Day" yesterday, and even "National Coming Out Day" is in the closet), and they're running candidates like Joe Sestak, three star admiral who was polling slightly ahead of Curt Weldon even before Foley became newsworthy. (The fact that Sandy Berger hosted a benefit for him would only be of interest to bloggers.)

Sestak's campaign people were leafleting the local train station at 7:00 a.m. this morning. He's looking fit and trim, every inch the warrior.

It's too early to tell, but I don't think the Dems have overplayed their hand as they have in the past. They're looking like winners.

Foley provides a marvelous opportunity to play praeteritio. If I were advising the Dems, I'd tell them to remind the voters that they're running a clean campaign and aren't going to dwell on the "Foley Republican Problem."

What frustrates me about the apparent fallout from the Foley scandal is that there's absolutely nothing logical about it. Iraq fatigue is understandable, but Mark Foley's actions really shouldn't affect any election other than that of Foley.

It's sheer emotion, manipulated by professionals.

Logic may be useful in the blogosphere, but it's useless with most voters. All they know is that they're pissed off.

With good reason, they're told!

Even Kim Jong Il setting off a nuke didn't bump Foley off the front page of today's Inquirer.

(Well, at least it was only an underage nuke.)

MORE: Victor Davis Hanson contrasts nukes with Foley's dirty talk and questions the wisdom of hyping a pervert into a national crisis:

...is the nuttiness because most Americans below 30 are now so poorly educated that they don't know, or care to know, the difference between Pyongyang and poontang? Or, given that these periodic fits of insanity about Dick Cheney's shotgun or George Bush's flight suit usually serve to denigrate some conservative, are these present pathetic efforts to hype a pervert to the level of a national crisis, just the frustrations of a liberal news media, angry that bright sassy minds like theirs have not been able to translate that self-proclaimed intellectual and moral superiority into political power?

This entire non-story could come right out of one of Dr. Zawahri's nutty sermons about American perversity and our puerile attention span. In fact, I'm sure we will be reading about Foley in the next al Qaeda infomercial, just as bin Laden paraphrased Michael Moore's invectives about President Bush reading a goat story to a little girl on the morning of September 11.

Part of it may be genuine preference for salacious gossip, and part of it may be that people are hungry for a good excuse to jettison their war fatigue without feeling guilty about jeopardizing security.

It might be a good idea to look at the dynamics in light of Glenn Reynolds' time-tested rule of American politics:

When the topic is defense, the Democrats lose. When it's sex, the Republicans lose.

Is sex that didn't happen more important than a nuke that did?

I think the logical answer is obvious, but since when was logic in charge?