(2006-10-09) — In the wake of the weekend detonation of North Korea’s first atomic bomb, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, called for the resignation of House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-IL.

“It’s important that lawmakers keep the main thing the main thing,” said Rep. Pelosi. “We can’t get so distracted by debates about North Korea’s sovereignty that we forget that Dennis Hastert is still on the loose, indirectly endangering America’s children.”

The timing of the atomic bomb test raises questions, she said, about when President George Bush first knew of former Rep. Mark FoleyÂ’s lurid instant message chats with teenage boys in the Congressional page program.

The California lawmaker said the North Korean nuclear test was “a natural result of George Bush’s failure to sit down with Kim Jong-Il and work out their differences. In effect, Bush pushed the button.”

“By failing to negotiate with President Kim,” she said, “Bush virtually assured a pre-election nuclear detonation that would knock the Foley scandal out of the headlines just in time for the Congressional elections. Reporters should be asking how Bush knew that the Foley scandal would break now?”

Mrs. Pelosi said the timing was “beyond coincidence, and has all the earmarks of another cynical Republican ploy to distract people with trivial national security issues so that they don’t hear our progressive Democrat plan to improve America by getting Hastert to quit.”