Hey, drive-by media, here's a sex scandal!

And it's even in the very same district that Mark Foley resigned from two years ago, the 16th District of Florida. In this case his Democrat successor, Tim Mahoney, reportedly paid his former mistress $121,000 in hush money - not only that, he also got her a job at a political consulting firm. Nice work if you can get it.

For those of you who have forgotten, the Foley case revolved around inappropriate e-mails to some of the pages who worked around the Capitol and the cover-up by GOP leaders. Between that and "macaca", the drive-by media had a field day assisting the Democrats who were running on a platform of cleaning up Washington.

Well, guess again. Even more damning are the allegations of a cover-up on the Democrat side:

Senior Democratic leaders in the House of Representatives, including Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL), the chair of the Democratic Caucus, have been working with Mahoney to keep the matter from hurting his re-election campaign, the Mahoney staffers said.

A spokesperson for Emanuel denies that account, but said Emanuel did confront Mahoney "upon hearing a rumor" about an affair in 2007 and "told him he was in public life and had a responsibility to act accordingly." The spokesperson added that it was a "private conversation" that had nothing to do with Mahoney's re-election prospects.

Right, because they knew if this came out at the wrong time Mahoney wouldn't have any re-election prospects. Then again, how long did it take for someone to get John Edwards to 'fess up about his "love child?" That came out in the National Enquirer for gosh sakes.

What makes this different and more serious than anything Foley did was the money involved. Definitely, the woman in question also has a lot of court time in store for her but you have to wonder where the investigation will be on this compared to the supposed abuse of power Sarah Palin exercised as Governor - a case hurried by a Democrat State Senator to arrive prior to Election Day and extended past its original scope. As originally brought up, Palin was cleared of any wrongdoing in sacking her Public Safety Commissioner because he was an at-will employee.

(If you want to read all 263 pages of the Palin report, you can do so here. It's noteworthy that the report assumes Palin wasn't worried about her ex-brother-in-law because she let go part of her security detail. I think the woman can handle firearms herself!)

And I'm not even going to go into the controversy about whether Barack Obama was actually born in America. We know John McCain wasn't born in the United States but in the Panama Canal Zone (when we still held the Panama Canal,) however Obama's been less forthcoming. My blogger friend Bob McCarty has been all over this one, beginning with this post of his and culminating with yesterday's video link.

In any of these cases, if the situation were reversed don't you think the evening news would be wall-to-wall with it? The answer is blatantly obvious and reveals part of the reason we in the pajamas media are more popular than ever.