Dead Tree Alert: It's 10:00. Do You Know Where Your Congressman Is?

In the newsstand edition of TIME this week, a few thoughts on how the Foley scandal has turned one of the GOP's greatest pop cultural assets--TV shows that terrify people about their kids' security--into a liability for the traditional law-and-order party.

The one point I didn't have room to discuss in the essay is what an inadvertently funny show "Dateline: To Catch a Predator" is. Last Friday's edition--the capstone to a multi-part bust of the Internet pervs of Petaluma, California--was full of bizzarely slapstick moments. Besides the usual tongue-tied evasions of the busted Humbert Humberts caught in the child-sex sting (I was just bringing sandwiches! I was going to talk her out of having sex with grown men!), there was the 40-something doctor making a mess on hidden camera as the frozen lemonade he poured out of a blender came out in one big glop, and the preview of a coming bust, in which Dateline's cameras catch a man who was nailed in an earlier "Predator" sting. Whoop!

It's the casual, quotidian clumsiness and ineptitude of these guys that makes them so despicable yet pitiable--Hannah Arendt's banality of evil turned into a blooper reel. The "Predator" sting series goes on vacation starting this week, but fear not, it'll be back: it's a big country and a big Internet, with a seemingly endless supply of clueless perverts and an endless appetite for sanctimonious voyeurism.