Incoming: more ethics problems for the new dem congressional leaders

he should recuse himself and if guilty they should ream his ass.

 

agreed

basso I love the fact that you've become concerned about ethics in government. I think it's a refreshing change from you overlooking the culture of corruption of the past republican majority to hold democrat's feet to the fire!

Good for you!

And I agree that if Mollohan has indeed broken laws he should be denied a post in the new democratic majority.

 

well now that his party isn't so tied up running this country into the ground they can focus on ethics

 

i agree w/ you completely. the probelm is that as someone who been a pretty staunch supporter of the bush administraion, you dont really have any room to talk when it comes to this kind of stuff.

 

Am I the only one who finds it funny that Basso's citing Josh Marshall's lefty muckraker site to make his case?

I wonder if right wing sites were posting stories like this about the Republican's ethical issues back in the day?

 

Don't you mean "ever?" And do you really have to wonder?

 

I'm not sure why being a Bush supporter should preclude him from commenting on this kind of stuff.

 

Isn't the whole "Porkbusters" thingy pretty much comprised of center to right-of-center bloggers?

 

Ha. It was the lefty bloggers that called attention to this and made it a story. While there might have been a few righties who were genuinely upset about Lott's comments after it became a story, most were willing to throw him overboard because he quickly came to be seen as a liability to the party and its supposed outreach to minorities. In other words, they paid lip service to the comments while they were really concerned about the political ramifications.

 

Funny you should mention that. I seem to remember that while some on the right eventually jumped on the bandwagon it was Marshall who first made Lott's remarks an issue on that one as well-


Bloggers catch what Washington Post missed

Oliver Burkeman in New York
Saturday December 21, 2002

Guardian

The momentum that ended in Trent Lott's resignation yesterday as the Senate majority leader did not, primarily, come from the traditional behemoths of the US media - the New York Times, the Washington Post and the main TV news networks.
Instead, the controversy has proved a defining moment for the vibrant online culture of weblogs - nimble, constantly updated, opinion-driven internet journals, freed from many of the constraints of the established media.

Mr Lott's incendiary comments on December 5 went unmentioned in the Washington Post's account of Senator Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party. They were not picked up by the New York Times, which defines the news in the US, until December 10.

In the interim, writers on numerous weblogs, or "blogs", were condemning the remarks - and swiftly uncovering evidence of a pattern in Mr Lott's public pronouncements of indulgence towards the racist policies of the Old South.

Josh Marshall, whose blog Talking Points Memo (www.talkingpointsmemo.com) has led the charge, said: "This was a story that the [established] press in DC was very well suited to miss, because even for people who wish it were otherwise, it's been understood for a long time that you've got various conservative Republicans who go in for this kind of stuff.

"Also, the way daily journalism works, a story has a 24-hour audition to see if it has legs, and if it doesn't get picked up, that's it."

Blogs, by contrast, can keep a story from expiring. Mr Marshall dredged up an interview Mr Lott had given to Southern Partisan, a magazine widely accused of promulgating racist views.

Another leftwing blogger, Atrios (www.atrios.blogspot.com), found a 1948 Thurmond campaign document telling voters that electing his rival, Harry Truman, would mean "anti-lynching and anti-segregation proposals will become the law of the land and our way of life in the South will be gone forever."

But the uproar united those from the left with the neo-conservatives such as Andrew Sullivan (www.andrewsullivan.com).

"Part of the genuine moral outrage for the younger crowd is that it really is simply unthinkable to us that anyone, even jokingly, perhaps especially jokingly, could have a good word to say for the presidential campaign of Strom Thurmond," Mr Sullivan wrote on his site yesterday.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2006

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,864036,00.html

 

So first your position was that those on the right never attacked this kind of issue and now that your assertion was shown to be false, it is that they got there after the left?

 

I'm not sure it should surprise anyone that a member of congress is a corrupt douchebag. It's easy enough to make a blanket statement like that - but it's even easier to see it for yourself.

Democrats are not the problem. Republicans are not the problem. Our entire system of government, and the scum infesting it, is the problem.

 

Imposing term limits would be a step in the right direction, but I'm not sure it's working in the executive branch - by the time someone reaches that level of government, they've usually already become too enmeshed in higher-level political circles.

 

of course you arent.

 

Sort of, except you miss the point. The example cited was one in which the right did not expose or condemn Lott until he became a political liability. Same with Delay, Hastert, and others. See no evil until it starts to take votes away.

And I was probably too generous with my qualifier in the second post. I doubt that there were any wingnuts who expressed genuine remorse for the literal meaning of Lott's comments. However, if you prove me wrong, I'll be happy apologize... I just don't feel like working my way through the right-wing miasma to check.

 

Didn't Repubs have the opportunity to set the standard for the Legislative Branch? How exactly did those fine fellows from the Class of 1992 do?