The rate at which elephants learn.
For reasons unbeknownst to ordinary people of ordinary sense, the GOP leadership has been incredibly slow to distance itself from the bizarre crop of corrupt, criminal, and otherwise tarnished persons who have come to public attention in the past several years. Tom DeLay came inexcusably close to overturning the Rostenkowski Rule upon his indictment; Mark Foley transgressions were known by several members of the House GOP leadership before his scandal broke; and as has been mentioned in this space, David Vitter will apparently suffer no long-term repercussions within the Senate for his solicitation of prostitutes. In an amazing display of incompetence, former Speaker Dennis Hastert even tied himself to the cause of corrupt Democratic Congressman William Jefferson, when the latter found himself the target of a well-deserved FBI raid. These were the major reasons for the Republican defeat in 2006, and they will doubtless be major factors in 2008 -- hypocrisy may be the tribute that vice pays to virtue, but given the choice, the voters will pick the party that does not practice it.
All this is prelude to saying: that Larry Craig is being stripped of his Senate leadership posts is good news indeed. It's taken them a long while and a bad election -- but the lumbering party apparatus may be learning.
posted by Joshua Trevino at 3:41 PM
2 Comments:
As a political liberal, I obviously have some level of schadenfreude towards the GOP at the moment.
The myriad of problems afflicting the GOP does two things - it gives conservative politics a bad name and it drives people towards left-leaning parties. Obviously I'm delighted since I believe that left-politics works better.
Nevertheless I am no truster of the Democrats either. The system of politics in the US lends itself to systemic corruption. The Democrats who have gained power, or will gain power, as a result of the conservative collapse, will eventually begin to have their own scandals.
I wish for good, transparent and accountable government. I hope conservatives will learn from blogs like Josh Marshall's TPM and set up their own factually based blog reporting network (the current group of conservative blogs is hardly factual and more noise making).
I would like to think that lefty blogs like AmericaBlog, DailyKos, Talking Points Memo and Crooks and Liars (amongst others) would be objective enough to hurl abuse at Democrat political, ethical and moral failures in the years to come. Given their overt support of the Dems, though, I have my doubts. So I hope you and other conservative bloggers will be more than ready to expose poor government in the years to come.
A wise colleague once told me that placing trust in politicians is a sure route to disappointment. I think the same holds true with regard to their partisans. The left-blogs won't be any better at policing their own than we were with ours, I think. But -- here's hoping.
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