Throwing Conservative Leaders Under the Bus

Mark Levin makes a point:

I thought we already had the House GOP shake-up when Tom DeLay was pushed from office and Roy Blunt lost the race for Majority Leader. Now we have to dump Dennis Hastert too? I remember when Newt Gingrich had to go, only to be replaced by Bob Livingston, but then he had to go, too. I remember when Trent Lott was pushed from office, replaced by Bill Frist. And then I heard rumblings about how Frist had to go because, well, he was ineffective. Meanwhile, the Democrats hang tough, through thick and thin. They slobber all over Bill Clinton, who actually had sex with a 19-year-old intern and abused his office and women left and right. William Jefferson, a Class-A crook, remains in office with no effort by his party to expel him because in a close election, Nancy Pelosi needs him. West Virginia’s Alan Mollohan has become wealthy in office, apparently helping to funnel money to his favorite causes. Sen. Bob Menendez apparently rented property to a nonprofit agency which he helped to receive federal funds. Cynthia McKinney assaulted a police officer, and she wasn't expelled. (The voters fired her.) John Murtha was an unindicted co-conspirator in the Abscam scandal, yet is now touted as the future House Democrat leader. And the media's favorite Republican, John McCain, was caught up in the Keating Five scandal. We have leakers, womanizers, boozers, and anti-Semites in Congress, not to mention Ted Kennedy. And I could go on and on.

Oh yes, I hear we conservatives are better than the liberals, and that we must hold ourselves to a higher standard. But throwing Republican leaders overboard to prove the point without sufficient information is no standard at all. It may make pundits more comfortable and may attract praise from unlikely circles, but it doesn't make us better than liberals. In fact, it doesn't make us better people, period. What we need is information. Most of us only learned about the Foley communications last Friday. Demanding Hastert’s head tonight, as I said in an earlier post, is irresponsible. Among other things, we need to know who was aware of these three-year-old instant messages, only to make them public at a time of enormous help to the House Democrats. Clearly Foley wasn’t the only one exploiting these teenagers.

I’ve been around Washington too long to know that scandals of this sort don’t just happen. Just ask Karl Rove and Lewis Libby. Three years later, most of us are appalled at the Fitzgerald investigation. But when Libby was indicted, many dismissed questions about the investigation as irrelevant to the charges.