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| Home Front: Politix |
| Scandalous Democrats |
| 2006-10-17 |
| Corruption: There's a big difference in how the parties handle misconduct within their ranks: Republicans accept blame and oust wrongdoers; Democrats wait until the public forgets, then call the culprit a hero. We're sure disgraced former Rep. Gerry Studds, D-Mass., wouldn't mind the timing of his death last weekend being described as . . . Dickensian. Coming weeks before elections in which a GOP sex scandal threatens a Democratic takeover of the House, Studds' death due to a blood clot might be expected to be a painful embarrassment for Democrats. Quite the contrary. Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said of this man censured by his colleagues from both parties in 1983 for having sex with an underage congressional male page: "Gerry's leadership changed Massachusetts forever and we'll never forget him." Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., called Studds, 69, "a committed environmentalist who worked hard to demonstrate that the cause of working people and the cause of the environment go hand in hand with the right leadership." At the same time, Democrats hypocritically insist the GOP be voted out because Mark Foley talked to pages over the Web about the kinds of things Studds actually did with a page. Foley resigned his Florida congressional seat at once; Studds defiantly stayed more than a decade after being censured. Studds' "husband" justified it, saying, "He gave people of his generation, of my generation, of future generations, the courage to do whatever they wanted to do." Doing whatever you want, and getting away with it, seems to be the liberal Democrat mantra. An FBI affidavit says that Rep. William Jefferson accepted a $100,000 bribe last year that he was apparently going to use to pay off a high-ranking Nigerian government official, with $90,000 of the cash found hidden in his freezer at home. Louisiana's state Democratic party committee — no stranger to corruption — even voted on Saturday to deny Jefferson its endorsement for re-election. Yet he remains a member of Congress, with no Democratic leader calling for his expulsion, or even for disciplinary action. There continues to be an avalanche of press attention on Foley. But where are all the Bob Woodward wannabes when it comes to Democrats' sleaze? The big TV, newspaper and magazine media outlets don't seem to have bothered to send any of their investigative reporting talent to Africa to look into the Jefferson affair. They're obviously too busy examining every piece of minutiae regarding Foley, not to mention Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The same media neglect involves Rep. Alan Mollohan, D-W.Va. He is being investigated by the FBI regarding nonprofit groups he allegedly help set up with $150 million in pork-barrel spending and business relationships with the administrators of the organizations. And the granddaddy of them all? Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid's Las Vegas land deal with a longtime friend, a casino lawyer with mob connections, landed him $1.1 million. Now that it's been revealed that Reid apparently violated Senate rules by not mentioning the deal in his Senate financial disclosure documents, he's entered into discussions with the Senate Ethics Committee. So where are the media big guns? If this were the Senate Republican leader, Bill Frist of Tennessee, they would be screaming. If the media are allowed to, they will kill these scandals with neglect, to be forgotten the way the Studds outrage was. What is at stake isn't just public awareness, but control of Congress. |
| Posted by:.com |
| #1 Which is why I gave up reading, watching and listening to the liberal media some time ago. Thank God for Fox News, the NY Post and NY Sun. |
| Posted by: DanNY 2006-10-17 21:39 |