About That Grand Jury...

by rayman

Liberal Oasis has a perceptive take on the tendentious nature of the tough-love criticism DeLay is receiving from his fellow right-wingers, such as Rick Santorum and John Fund. Far from rebuking their benefactor, these snake-oil salesmen have deluded themselves into thinking that referring the charges against DeLay onto the fair and balanced House Ethics Committee will wash their hands of all this unpleasentness:

Yesterday, LiberalOasis argued that Sen. Rick Santorum’s Sunday comments were not really intended to slap DeLay, as they have been portrayed throughout the media.

On the contrary, they were in sync with DeLay’s own call to have the House Ethics Cmte (which has been packed with DeLay loyalists) look at the allegations.

First, John Fund of the Wall Street Journal exploited his paper’s newfound cache (as it’s editorial board recently criticized DeLay) to dutifully drum the same talking point:

I think that there is some questions about these trips and some questions about the funding of them that should be answered.

That's probably best handled by an Ethics Committee that's divided evenly between the two parties. That's how we've handled previous things.

And the Ethics Committee has been reconstituted, they should be given the chance to go back and look at all of this.

He even had the chutzpah to spin the recent purge of independent GOPers from the ethics panel as some sort of cleansing “reconstitution.”

Following Fund’s sorry performance, DeLay ally Rep. Roy Blunt went on CNN to echo the same talking points.

[DeLay is] eager to go to the Ethics Committee and let them look at these things that have generally been previously cleared by them.

This passes for fair and balanced on CNN.

The conservative DeLay “critic” supports turning the matter over to the neutered Ethics Cmte. The conservative DeLay buddy wants the same, as apparently does DeLay himself.

The message is patently clear: conservatives sure believe in ethics!

The only problem with this devious Republican strategy? Er, those ongoing grand jury investigations against DeLay, as TAPPED reminded us yesterday:

The ongoing investigations into Abramoff, a very close associate of DeLay's -- along with that of "a state grand jury in Texas that has indicted two of [DeLay's] chief political operatives, including the director of his political action committee, on charges of illegal fund-raising," according to The New York Times -- means that the DeLay ethics story will get pushed forward regardless of what journalists chose to investigate on their own, because the full investigative apparatus of the state is being brought to bear to expose dealings on the Republican side, even in the absence of a functioning House ethics committee. More than 30 F.B.I. agents have investigated Abramoff's activities as part of the work of the Justice Department's task force, along with agents from the Internal Revenue Service.

Do these scheming Republicans not understand that the ethics charges filed against DeLay last autumn and the looming criminal indictments (both for the Texas redistricting fiasco and the Abramoff shenanigans) are two separate things? Apparently.