Dermot McEvoy at Publisher's Weekly wanted to know how Ms. Matalin felt about Mr. Hudson, whose righteous lifelong efforts in the name of Christian morality were ever so slightly tarnished when the student he got involved with with at Fordham brought a sexual abuse suit against him.

Her response? "Deal Hudson’s contributions to advancing conservative ideas and idealism is seminal... I have always felt privileged to work with him and honored to publish him."

The rest of the article's substantially more compelling than that, and it includes quotations from Mr. Hudson's books where he addresses the sex scandal directly.

That is, until the National Catholic Reporter discovered that he'd taken advantage of a troubled 18-year-old student at Fordham, and been forced out of his tenured professorship there. The campaign dropped him, shocked, shocked that a moral leader would violate so many commandments at the same time. Crisis forced him out as publisher a bit later, after other, similar stories emerged, according to the Washington Times, but kept him on to run something called the Morley Institute for Church and Culture.

And maybe the White House wasn't that outraged after all. We've been faxed an invitation to the American Patriot Dinner at the Union League Club here on April 13. The dinner is a benefit for Crisis and for the Morley Institute, hosted by Pataki friend William Plunkett, among others.

And the headline speaker at the event is a Bush cabinet member, Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Nicholson. So the Bushies are now basically raising money to pay Hudson's salary. Which is characteristically loyal. And we're glad to see how high forgiveness ranks as a value.

Over to you, Joe Feuerherd.