The Feld-Blog

Karl Rove, Randy “Duke” Cunningham, Tom Delay, Dick Cheney, Arnold Schwarzenegger and now Bill Frist. What do all these people have in common? They’ve all been implicated in financial or political scandals. They also all happen to be Republican. In fact, the members of the Republican leadership seem to glide past the media spotlight just in time to be picked off like targets in a side show shooting gallery. Rove leaked the name of a covert CIA agent. Duke Cunningham sold his home for millions more than it was worth to a defense contractor not to mention his fist fight on the floor of the House of Representatives. Delay violated a veritable gamut* of House ethics rules, taking contributions he shouldn’t have and reimbursing personal travel expenses with taxpayer’s dollars. Cheney was enveloped by Halliburton and Enron scandals. And Arnold Schwarzenegger, after taking office made back-door deals with dietary supplement companies and fitness magazines -- so much for leaving the bodybuilding and acting business to go into legitimate politics.

Now Bill Frist has lobbed his own dirty laundry onto the pile to air out with the rest of the Republican dirt hanging from the pages of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. For years he has been holding onto blind-trust shares of HCA, Inc., a company founded and run by his father and brother. First of all, Congressional ethics rules allow him to actually, though indirectly manage the shares in his own blind trust. First of all, this completely undercuts the motivation for putting the shares in a blind trust, which was to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. Furthermore, the time he finally sold his shares --supposedly to fend off accusations of a conflict of interest, although he has owned them for years now -- coincided conveniently with an all-time peak value for the stocks and immediately preceded a dramatic plunge. It wasn’t so long ago we slapped an unwieldy ankle bracelet to Martha Stewart for similar offenses.

So they aren’t holding up 7-11s at gunpoint. That is comforting. Still, the sheer volume of white-collar crime spewing from Republican leadership is more than a little bit disconcerting. Is there some twisted, law-breaking initiation ritual I am missing? Is there a significant bipartisan component to this that I just havent caught? Last I checked Democratic leadership is only guilty of sputtering away elections and allowing conservatives retain their iron grasp of all three branches of government.

So often we dismiss the fallacies of foreign governments quipping, "of course they cant get anything done. Of course they don't actually represent their people. They are corrupt." Perhaps we should check the cleanliness of our own hands before pointing such accusatory fingers.