WASHINGTON — Five out of six Americans think Congress stinks. Can this republic be saved?

It's been a terrible, horrible year for the legislative branch. Lawmakers got virtually no work done, including passing the spending bills required by law, but they whined a lot.

We've lurched from one smelly scandal to another, month after month. Four Republicans who held influential posts in the House — Randy "Duke" Cunningham of California, Bob Ney of Ohio, Mark Foley of Florida and Tom DeLay of Texas — are gone in disgrace.

Not one top leader, from House Speaker Dennis Hastert to Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, has escaped unscathed. The page scandal happened on Hastert's watch; Reid's land deals came under scrutiny. Senate GOP leader Bill Frist became known as the man who couldn't make the trains run on time. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi became the other woman Republicans love to hate and demonize (the first being Hillary).

So, new polling indicates that just 16 percent of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing. (One wonders where those 16 percent have been for the past 12 months.)

The good news, such as it is, for incumbents is that many Americans personally like their own representative or senator, but can't abide all those other goofballs on Capitol Hill. While voters are angry at Republicans, they aren't much enamored of Democrats.

The issue now, as the crucial Nov. 7 elections approach, is whether Americans will be so disgusted that they won't vote or whether they'll be inspired to vote to try to make a difference, take a serious look at the candidates, plow through the forest of negative ads, read up on the candidates' records and decide that voting is the best revenge.

That's asking a lot of overworked citizens who are scrambling to make a living, watch over their children and parents, contribute to the organizations they support and care for themselves and their property. Voting guides are often meaningless or confusing; political ads are deceptive and mean-spirited.

If it weren't for the much-maligned (and often rightly so) news media, Americans wouldn't even know about the scandals on Capitol Hill. As it is, most have no idea who Cunningham, Ney, Foley, DeLay, Hastert, Reid, Frist and Pelosi are.

But this is a nation at war, and we need to do some thinking about what that means. Putting aside, for the moment, the rightness of the rationale of the war in Iraq and the validity of the president's motivations, watching Iraq slip so easily into chaos should give us pause. Don't we have a duty to provide an example to the world of what a real democracy is?