Another scandal, another coverup, another snarling attack on leakers

Glenn Greenwald is masterful here on Hastert's disgraceful "investigation"--not into the Republican cover-up of its knowledge of Mark Foley's issues, but into who spilled the beans about the cover-up.

Which, as Greenwald points out, has been the M.O. from Day One of our One-Party-Rule Era.

Whenever someone exposes wrongdoing on the part of Beltway Republicans, their reaction has been to attack and threaten those who expose the wrongdoing. When Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill published a book with Ron Suskind which revealed that the administration was planning to attack Iraq long before 9/11, they began immediately threatening O'Neill with a criminal investigation over documents they claimed he improperly took. When The New York Times exposed the President's illegal eavesdropping, they threatened a criminal investigation of the reporters and editors who published the story. And now Hastert is attempting to depict as the real criminals those who exposed the conduct of the House GOP leaders in the Foley scandal.

.... It is critical to keep in mind what this scandal is about and what it is not about. It is true that there are legal and criminal aspect to this scandal, but legal issues here are secondary at most. This is not a case involving complex federal criminal statutes or debates over whether enough evidence can be compiled demonstrating that GOP House leaders broke the law. Instead, the issue is one of political corruption and lack of character -- the fact that the GOP House leadership is so devoted to preservation of its own power that they are willing to do anything, no matter how corrupt or repugnant, to cling to that power.

The behavior of the GOP House leadership here is reprehensible and intolerable even if they are able to avoid criminal prosecution for it. That point, after all, was supposedly the centerpiece of Republican rule in Washington, according to the President:

Let me say a few words about important values we must demonstrate while all of us serve in government. First, we must always maintain the highest ethical standards. We must always ask ourself (sic) not only what is legal, but what is right. There is no goal of government worth accomplishing if it cannot be accomplished with integrity.

Even worse than Hastert's deliberate exclusion of the real issue here from the scope of the investigation he requested is the real purpose of his letter -- which is to trigger a criminal investigation and prosecution by the Bush-controlled Justice Department of those in the media and elsewhere who revealed to the American public that the GOP House leadership was protecting a predator in their midst.

Read the whole article...