Here we go again. Back in December, the guys over at Powerline were having a hard time remembering any Bush Administration officials who had been touched by scandal. It was such a laughable proposition that we decided to help them out and started compiling a rogues gallery of this scandal-plagued administration. You can see the list that readers helped us come up with here. It’s a little out of date now, what with Democratic oversight and all.
With such a long list, you wouldn’t think Powerline could so easily forget. But I suppose it’s easy to forget what you don’t really want to know. Here is part of a Powerline post from today (thanks to TPM Reader WB for the link), about all of the “faux scandals” being played up by the left-wing media:
The truth is that the Bush administration has been extraordinarily scandal-free. Not a single instance of corruption has been unearthed. Only one significant member of the executive branch, Scooter Libby, has been convicted of anything. Whether the jury’s verdict was right or wrong, that case was an individual tragedy unrelated to any underlying wrongdoing by Libby or anyone else.
Funny. Just yesterday we learned that a deputy secretary of state resigned because of his ties to the D.C. madam sex scandal and that the chief of staff to the head of the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division had resigned because of his alleged personal ties to the Abramoff scandal. That’s not to mention the fallout from the U.S. Attorney purge scandal, the guilty plea of the former No. 2 at the Interior Department, also in the Abramoff scandal, and the list goes on.
If you’re a hard-core conservative reading Powerline, does this sort of nonsense make you feel better about yourself or about your beliefs? For the uninformed, maybe it offers the assurance that things are okay. For the semi-informed, maybe it comforts them that things aren’t as bad as they may seem. At what point does the internal dissonance of those who read and write such garbage exact a personal toll–morally, emotionally, spiritually?
