Saipan Forever!

Before the wingnuts start screaming about Tom Daschle as a symbol of Corruption, Democrat Style, people like the Powertools better do a through search of their own archives:

The criminal charges against DeLay by the corrupt and hyper-political Travis County D.A., Ronnie Earle, are, I think, a joke.

What I still don’t understand is, what exactly is the Jack Abramoff "scandal"? Abramoff got caught trying to defraud investors in a cruise ship, but that had nothing to do with Congress. Yet prosecutors gave him a break in return for his agreement to testify against Congressmen. The question is, does he have anything to say?

If we begin by acknowledging that neither lobbying nor making political contributions is illegal, or unethical, or in the slightest degree blameworthy, it is hard to tell from the news coverage to date what the "scandal" is. The only Congressman named in the criminal information filed against Abramoff is Bob Ney of Ohio, but, as I noted here, the claims relating to Ney appear weak. So far, I’ve heard no inkling of any more substantial evidence Abramoff has offered to give against any other Congressman.

I’m not going to defend Daschle on the tax front, no self-respecting liberal would. (See D-Day and Steve Benen.) But Jack Abramoff associate Todd Boulonger just pled guilty, and a lecture on "corruption" from John Hinderaker is about as welcome as a disquisition on birth control from Nadya Suleman.

There are some interesting attempts by younger conservatives to come to grips with how the Republican Party needs to change in order to be viable going forward. When the Heritage Foundation’s Ed Feulner tried to run the tired play of claiming that the failures of the Republican Party aren’t the failures of conservatism over at The Next Right, Jon Henke sacrificed his invite to the annual Heritage Christmas party by challenging Feulner and wondering where the new ideas were.

The online right exhausted itself during the Bush years because there was no limit to the propaganda they would push to defend indefensible kleptocrats who wrapped themselves in the flag. They shot their credibility. If it wasn’t for wingnut welfare operations like Pajamas Media (R.I.P.), Heritage and other right-wing think tanks like Claremont (who subsidize the Power Tools), it’s hard to imagine that public enthusiasm for the "Big Lie" would have seen traffic levels sufficient to keep them afloat.

But Twitterfests and hashtags won’t fix the huge credibility and trust gap that the online right will suffer until they own up to the embarrassing blindness and sycophancy of their standard bearers like Hinderaker for the past 8 years. Because nobody rational is going to look for ideological guidance from a movement whose leading lights serve up lectures about Democrats and "corruption" when they willingly pushed the idea that DeLay, Ney and Abramoff were railroaded.