Harry Reid Financial Scandal Gets Mostly Media YAWN!

In the last 24 hours, the number of Google stories which mention the "Mark Foley Page Scandal" has grown by 200,000 articles to 11,700,000.

Meanwhile, the number of stories relating to the Senate MINORITY Leader Harry Reid's real estate scandal has stayed steady at about 315,000.

One man, a rather minor Congressional Republican, resigned from Congress when allegations about improper and offensive online contact with House Pages was brought to light. Another man, the most powerful Democrat in the Senate, basically shrugs off allegations of financial wrongdoing and mob ties with seeming impunity.

Priorities and Focus A Bit Out of Whack? You Bet!

There was enormous pressure on House Speaker Denny Hastert to resign in the wake of the Foley scandal, claiming Hastert didn't do enough to protect the Pages from Foley's online messages. That theme was echoed by some House Republicans and conservative newspapers like the Washington Times.

Please name for me the Democrats in the Senate, or their media allies who have called on Reid to resign? Is this deja vu with Clinton all over again? Laws, ethics and rules of conduct are ONLY meant to be applied to Republicans?

The few editorials run on the subject of Reid's behavior tend to be both damning, and yet somewhat forgiving when it comes to accountability.

The Philadelphia Inquirer comes about as close to suggesting Reid go when they say: "Unless Reid comes up with a better explanation for this lack of disclosure, Democrats should not keep him as their leader in the new Congress in 2007."

Well yee haw! Any Republican in Congress even suspected of wrongdoing is thrown out before Democrats can say "RAISE TAXES" and the best the Inquirer could do is that?

The Washington Post Editorial on this subject couldn't even bring itself to so mild a rebuke as the Philly Inquirer. Though they did give details on the damaging aspects of this hidden scandal:

THE BEST CASE for Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) is that he was sloppy about financial disclosure rules in accounting for a real estate deal on which he made a $700,000 profit. The more unattractive case is that the senator's inaccurate description of the investment was an effort to disguise his partnership with a Las Vegas lawyer who's never been charged with wrongdoing but whose name has surfaced in federal investigations involving organized crime, casinos and political bribery since the 1980s.
...
"Everything I did was transparent," Mr. Reid said at a news conference Wednesday, after the story broke. "Everything is fully disclosed to the ethics committee and everyone else. As I said, if there is some technical change that the ethics committee wants, I'll be happy to do that."

Mr. Reid's professions of transparency and full disclosure are transparently wrong. His investment was not reported in a manner that made clear his partnership with Mr. Brown.

"Sloppy about financial disclosure rules?" Well excuse me! "Sloppy" reminds me of the excuse put forward by the Clintonistas to explain former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger's illegal removal of highly classified documents from the National Archives relating to terrorism and then destroying them.

The "sloppy" excuse is the latest variation of the famous "bureaucratic snafu" which Clinton used to explain how 1,000 highly sensitive FBI files on major Republicans wound up as nighttime reading material at the Clinton White House.

It's clear that there will be no meaningful ethics reform in Washington if the entire process is co-opted by the Democrat Party as a tool to bash Republicans while Democrats with WORSE violations are shielded by the lamestream media and any accountability within their own party.

Finally, ask yourself: Is the Democrat Senator from Massachusetts who left a woman to slowly suffocate while he went to bed following an accident he failed to report until the next day still a respected member of the Senate Democrat caucus?

Congrats to the Strata-Sphere for his extensive work on the Reid story. He got a big thumbs up today from Rush Limbaugh.