Because, see, the GOP favors less regulation of Wall Street, which naturally was all the country’s chief securities policemen needed to know to justify spending thousands of work hours surfing sites like “skankwire.” Milton Friedman: The Larry Flynt of American political philosophy?

The Securities and Exchange Commission is supposed to be the sheriff of the financial industry, looking for financial crimes like Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. But the new report, obtained by ABC News, says senior employees of the SEC spent hours on the commission’s computers looking at sites like naughty.com, skankwire, youporn, and others.

The investigation, which was conducted by the SEC’s internal watchdog at the request of Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, found 31 serious offenders over the past two and a half years. Seventeen of the offenders were senior SEC officers with salaries ranging from $100,000 to $222,000 per year.

One senior attorney at SEC headquarters in Washington spent up to eight hours a day accessing Internet porn. When he filled all the space on his government computer with pornographic images, he downloaded more to CDs and DVDs that accumulated in boxes in his offices.

An SEC accountant attempted to access porn websites 1,800 times in a two-week period and had 600 pornographic images on her computer hard drive.

No word on whether “the past two and a half years” includes any surfing during the age of regulatory Hopenchange, but another SEC investigation covering the period from October 2008 to March 2009 found that a supervisor in the L.A. office was, er, also “fiddling” while Rome burned. Since we’re playing politics with this creepy, disturbing story, can we blame that on left-wing sexual libertinism? Exit question per the blockquote: “Her”? Click the image to watch.