A Brief History In Snark
Daniel Henninger from the Opinion Journal offers up a brief, yet utterly snarky, history of ethics in Washington. It is absolutely hysterical and also spot on. All the high flown rhetoric coming from Nancy Pelosi about ethics reform should sound really, really familiar. Why? Because it has all been done before. And all undone quietly later.
Ethics in politics is not the same as ethics in real life. Ethics in politics is a martial art. The biggest mistake you can make is thinking that the ethics package proposed by new Speaker Nancy Pelosi is mainly about "cleaning up" politics. Maybe. But it's first of all about cleaning the clocks of the Republicans.
The House Republicans got lazy. Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, earmarks, Duke Cunningham, Bob Ney. When Nancy Pelosi saw the Republicans had developed a compulsion to flagrantly throw their weight around, she grabbed them by the lapels of their Hickey Freeman suits, hoisted them into the air and slammed them onto the House floor, shrieking "the most corrupt Congress in history!" That's right. In history.
Ms. Pelosi started the long road to earning a black belt in political ethics (again, not to be confused with ethics as taught at, say, Aquinas College) back in 1987 by studying the Master–Newt Gingrich. That was the year Nancy Pelosi entered the House as a California freshperson. And that was the year Newt Gingrich turned ethics into a weapon against the imperious Democratic House Speaker Jim Wright, who left in disgrace two years later. "We currently have the least ethical speaker in the 20th Century," said Grandmaster Gingrich. Nancy noticed.
Read the whole thing. It's always good to start the day with a chuckle. As Henninger points out, the "reforms" that Pelosi is ushering in are aimed outside of the halls of the House. The poor, innocent Congress will no longer be inadvertently led astray by evil outsiders. Um. Sure. I'm guessing that ways around the Pelosi rules have already been figured out. Ways around the rules always are. Which leads to more grist for the snark mill later.
By Jack Gunter, Jr., Friday, 5 January , 2007 @ 8:46 am
I can believe a lot of things I see on the internet. After all if it wasn’t true then it couldn’t be on the internet, but ethics in Washington? That’s a bit of a stretch even for me.