“Were I to discover that my only possibility of happiness lay in excessive perpetration of the most atrocious crimes, without a qualm I’d enact every last one of them this very instant, certain — that the foremost of the laws Nature decrees to me is to enjoy myself, no matter at whose expense.”

Marquis de Sade, Juliette

Here are three salient facts about the Republican Party’s ever-deepening pederasty scandal.

The first is that Rep. Mark Foley (who, had he not been elected to Congress, would be living in a van down by the river, like his more reputable brother Matt, the noted motivational speaker) conducted a cyber-sex chat with a teenage boy while Congress was voting on a war appropriation measure.

The second is that the highest echelons of the Republican Party knew that Foley was an active, predatory pederast – and encouraged him to run for re-election anyway.

The third is that the most notable – perhaps the only — legislative achievement of the Republicans in the run-up to the mid-term election was to enact a measure legalizing torture by executive decree.

For all of the GOP’s pretense of morality, for all of its flatulent rhetorical effusions in praise of virtue, the truth is this:

The organizing principle of the GOP is Sadism.

The Marquis de Sade was not merely a pioneer of modern perversion. He was also a philosopher (if that word can be tortured – forgive me, “coercively interrogated”) into applying here – of the Total State. For Sade, personal corruption and concentrated political power were co-efficients in the revolution to bring about the total state. In order to build such a state, its agents would have to free themselves from the restraints of God’s law and conventional morality.

“If from immolating three million human victims you stand to gain no livelier pleasure than that to be had from eating a good dinner,” Sade instructed his contemporary disciples, “you ought to treat yourself to it without an instant’s hesitation.”

His only criticism of the French Revolutionary reign of terror, comments historian Geoffrey Ashe in his book The Hell-Fire Clubs: A History of Anti-Morality, was that “the killing was being done from a bad motive, politics instead of pleasure.”

Sadism is largely about gratifying illicit appetites, but it’s primarily about eradicating moral restraints on individual behavior. Its chief objective is the liberation of the libido – not only sexual lust, but the lust for power. Where no restraints inhibit the latter, the former can easily be serviced as well.

Bill Clinton was singing from Sade’s hymnal when, in an interview two years ago, he said that he exploited Monica Lewinsky for the “worst possible reason – just because I could.”

The same could be said by, and about, Mark Foley, as well.

When Clinton came under siege for his debased conduct in the Oval Office, and the corrupt means he used in trying to preserve his position, his supporters treated impeachment as a “coup” and rallied to his defense. Whatever depraved things Clinton did, his supporters maintained, the important thing was to keep him, and his party, in power.

The same refrain is now being sung by the GOP’s leaders and defenders, led by the thrice- and currently-divorced “epitome of morality and virtue” (notorious for, inter alia, taking Viagra along during a weekend junket to the Dominican Republic, a notorious hot spot for sex tourism). The Foley scandal is a strategically timed dirty trick intended to depress the Republican vote, and give power back to the Democrats – which would be a disastrous setback in the “war on terror.”

This follows a conspiracy by the House GOP leadership to protect the pederast out of simple political expediency. And now the Republican leadership is defending the House Speaker who conspired to suppress the truth about Foley’s alleged crimes.

The GOP’s perspective on Foley could be tidily summarized thus:

Protecting a pederast is the price we must pay in order to continue slaughtering foreigners, torturing innocent detainees, and consolidating power in an all-powerful Executive.

Somewhere in hell, Sade is taking a brief break from his assigned duties – today, he was emptying Stalin’s bedpans – to enjoy a furtive smile of satisfaction over the hypocritical depravity displayed by his Republican disciples.