What About Crazy Nancy's Ethics?

If Tom DeLay is crook, Nancy Pelosi must be a mafia donna:

In what pundits are calling a quid pro quo for her hard line on the ethics of House Majority Leader Tom Delay, R-TX, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, is under fire for an adviser’s nine-day, $4,475 junket to Spain and Germany last April, a trip primarily paid for by a nonprofit transportation-research organization Pelosi had helped to secure Federal Transit Administration monies, according to a report in the Washington Times.

According to the report, the president of WestStart-CALSTART also gave money to Pelosi’s political action committee at the same time.

The trip is fodder for some Republicans, who say Pelosi and others have been going overboard when criticizing DeLay on ethics charges.

"Given the actions of the minority leader vis-a-vis the majority leader and other Republicans, I’m having a little trouble finding where the outrage is coming from these groups that continue to pound on Republican members," a senior Republican lawmaker said on the condition of anonymity.

Although the Pelosi camp has issued a statement maintaining that the disputed trip was within House rules, the anonymous lawmaker told the Times that nothing distinguished Pelosi’s actions from those of DeLay and other Republicans that she has criticized.

"I think the minority leader ought to be subject to the same type of scrutiny as other members," he said, adding that the questions about Mrs. Pelosi rise to the point of an ethics complaint.

Eight years ago, after House Dems had finally managed to bludgeon Newt Gingrich into cutting a deal with the Ethics Committee that they could (and did) hang around his neck as a confession of "guilt," the Wall Street Journal's post-mortem on the debacle drew this conclusion (paraphrased):

The House ethics wars have become the political equivalent of gang warfare. And the first rule of gangware is, "If they take out one of ours, we take out two of theirs; if they put one of us in the hospital, we put two of them in the morgue."

If Dems really want to try and "criminalize" in DeLay's case matters that don't even violate the spirit of House ethics rules at the same time that their own leader has engaged in substantially shadier conduct by that very same standard, all they'll succeed in doing (provided majority Republicans' spines don't telescope) is hoisting themselves on their own scandalmongering petard.