I was in and out of the car a few times this afternoon and caught snippets of Sean Hannity interviewing a couple of different Democratic congressmen. (I didn't happen to catch their names.) Hannity was grilling them on incoming Speaker Nancy Pelosi's pledge to run the most ethical Congress ever. He was harping on Pelosi's support of John Murtha for majority leader and the speculation that impeached federal judge Alcee Hastings would be named ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee trying to get one of these congressmen to admit that Pelosi's pledge had been rendered meaningless.

It was a stupid and pointless exercise on Hannity's part because no Democratic member of the House was going to come even close to saying that.

Along the way, though Hannity's myopic focus seemed to prevent him noticing, the representatives I heard did manage to reveal something of what Pelosi's "most ethical Congress" might look like.

(As an aside, one of the representatives complained that Hannity was digging into the past to come up with skeletons in the Democratic closet and that if you added it the combined age of all the issues mentioned was about a hundred years. This is perhaps the stupidest argument I have ever heard. As if the combined age of several ethical lapses could somehow erase any individual case.)

What was striking is that the two Congressman I heard had essentially the same response to questions about the ethical lapses of Murtha, Hastings and William Jefferson. "They were never indicted. They were never convicted." And yes, one of these guys even put forth the distinction that despite being impeached by the house and convicted in the Senate on eight chareges and removed from the federal bench, Alcee Hastings had not been criminally convicted. Essentially they were saying is that the standard they are setting for the "most ethical Congress ever" is whatever they can get away with.

What these distinguished gentlemen failed to recognize, and Hannity obliviously failed to call them on (Note: I did not hear the entire show and am basing this on the striking similarity between the two interviews - and having heard Hannity before) is that violating ethics and being criminally prosecuted are two different standards.

Posted by: Stephen Macklin at 02:53 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment