WASHINGTON – Who says this town moves at a snail’s pace? Leave it for a month and the whole place changes.

While this column was on hiatus for a few weeks, the following happened:

“DeLay is DeGone, as they say. But don’t cry for Tom DeLay. His resignation, a byproduct of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, will most likely usher the Hammer into the same lucrative retirement fraternity as Newt Gingrich, Bob Livingston and other fallen Republican revolutionaries.

“Cynthia McKinney loses her Fraternal Order of Police endorsement. The Georgia Democratic congresswoman’s alleged cell phone assault of a Capitol Hill police officer who failed to recognize her while she detoured around a security checkpoint is still unresolved.

Here’s an easy way to avoid such future contretemps: Make members of Congress go through security like the rest of us. Or is the Imperial Congress too important to endure the post-Sept. 11 inconveniences that have become a part of everyday life for the people who pay their salaries?

A couple of years ago, Bob Dole, the decorated World War II vet, ex-senator and presidential candidate, was pulled out of a line for extra security screening at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

An 80-year-old man who couldn’t button his own shirts because of war wounds was told to remove his shoes and stand on one foot for five seconds.

But rather than go off on the poor screener who didn’t recognize him as Someone Important, the Bobster treated his inconvenience with humility and humor. (“I didn’t have to take my clothes off, so that was nice of them,” he later quipped.)

“John McCain’s “Straight Talk Express” takes a detour through Jerry Falwell’s backyard. Who’d have thought McCain would make peace with the preacher he labeled an “agent of intolerance” in the 2000 presidential primaries? McCain’s May 13 speech at Falwell’s Liberty University will mark the transformation of the maverick into the mainstream front-runner for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. (The late Paul Tsongas might have declared McCain’s speech a “pander bear” moment.)

Now, some former supporters (including liberals who have just discovered – gasp! – that the longtime opponent of abortion and big deficits and supporter of a strong defense is a conservative) must find someone else to fill the role of anti-establishment Republican.

That might be ex-New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani – a supporter of gay and abortion rights – if he runs for the GOP nomination from the left in 2008.

“President Bush’s job-approval numbers continue to slide toward Jimmy Carter-malaise levels. Sectarian violence in Iraq and high gas prices at home – where Americans seem both anxious and angry – will do that to a presidency.

But it’s not all Bush’s fault. The doom and gloom caucuses have overrun both political parties.

Day in, day out, the strategy of both Republicans and Democrats in 2006 seems to be to scare the heck out Americans by portraying the other side as nothing short of ushers for Armageddon. Maybe someone could channel Franklin Delano Roosevelt and declare: “We have nothing to fear but the politics of fear.”

“And in living proof that whoever said there are no second acts in politics was dead wrong, the widely disgraced ex-Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael Brown is offering to give free advice on how disaster-ravaged towns and parishes can cut through government red tape.