Some days, I don’t know whether to laugh, cry .
. . or run for the hills. What’s gotten me wound up is a little news item
about Dennis Hastert. He’s that rotund Republican who serves as
speaker of the House of Representatives. It seems that he’s now
proposing a new training session for our lawmakers in Washington. The
course is to be in — guess what? — ethics. Ethics! Talk about
shutting the barn door after the horse is already out! Let’s glance at just a few of the top
Congressional critters who have slipped out of the ethical barn. We have
Duke Cunningham, who has admitted taking $2 million in bribes from
corporations wanting Pentagon contracts. We have Bill Frist, the Senate
leader, now under multiple investigations for insider trading. We have Tom
DeLay, dragging a whole scuzzy sack of scandals and indictments. We have
Bob Ney and several other members embroiled in the sorry scams of hotshot
lobbyist Jack Abramoff. We have a horde of lawmakers mired in that fetid
ethical swamp we call Congress. A spokesman for Hastert says, “The speaker
wants members on both sides of the aisle to understand the nuances of House
rules.” Nuances? Do members really need a course in ethical nuances
to grasp that bribery is a no-no? Speaking of rules, Hastert himself
routinely stomps on the rules of the House in his blunderbuss efforts to
ram special-interest legislation through Congress. What’s really got the Republican leadership
suddenly talking ethics is not any desire to clean up but polls showing
that voters are so sickened by the corruption that they rank Congress lower
than toxic-waste dumps in approval ratings. It’s going to take more
than ethics training to scrub that bunch clean.
This article appears in Jan 12-18, 2006.
