A Crippling Lack of Discretion

Anger, it seems, really does make fools of all it possesses.

***Take Travis County, Texas District Attorney Ronnie Earle, for instance. His reputation for using his office as a partisan truncheon is already notorious (just as Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, whom Earle tried to prosecutorally smear in her first senate run back in 1993). Ditto his open hostility to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, associates of whose PAC are being investigated by Earle's office.

So, with all of that already floating in the kettle, why on Earth would Earle give a recklessly slanderous public speech attacked DeLay further at a Democrat party fundraising event?

"For Ronnie Earle to say with a straight face that he is an unbiased prosecutor is laughable," said state GOP Chairman Tina Benkiser of Houston. "Ronnie Earle's political motives are transparent. He is tainted and he should resign."

In his speech at the Democrat fundraiser, white-collar crime prosecutor Earle said, "If it isn't this Tom DeLay, it'll be another one - just like one bully replaces the one before. This is a structural problem involving the combination of money and power. Money brings power and power corrupts."

If the whole idea behind this "get the Hammer" campaign is to cow House Republicans into abandoning their Majority Leader, and you were the prosecutor whose indictment was a crucial ingredient in that effort (all the more so since Crazy Nancy Pelosi's ethics jihad had boomeranged so embarrasingly), wouldn't you be a whole lot more careful than to trigger public pissing matches that can only cause Republicans to rally around Representative DeLay instead?

***Of course, when it comes to public indiscretions, Ronnie Earle is just an amateur compared to the other Dem who's been on the Hammer's ass more avidly than his Charmin and Fruit of the Looms combined. And today was that Dem's judgment day.

Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean insisted on Sunday's Meet the Press that House Majority Leader Tom DeLay should be treated more harshly than Osama bin Laden.

In a pointedly embarrassing interview with NBC's Tim Russert, the DNC chairman spent almost the entire program under withering attack as Russert demonstrated Dean's hypocrisy on past comments he made about abortion, his criticisms of Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly and the way he has tried to explain away his party's fundraising woes since he took the DNC helm in February....

Rather than using the national program as a platform to launch broadsides against the Bush Administration and aggressively tout the Democrats' agenda, Dean appeared mired in his own past.

During the show, Dean claimed, "Hypocrisy is a value that I think has been embraced by the Republican Party," and he vowed to Russert that "I will use whatever position I have in order to root out hypocrisy."

Ironically, Russert played the hypocrisy-exposing role as he repeatedly unmasked Dean's integrity on key issues....

Captain Ed live-blogged Chairman How's debacle. It's a very entertaining read.

All I can add is that this is what the hard-left wanted in the designated face of their party - a raving crypto-Marxist lunatic - and they're getting exactly what they paid for, as well as what they deserve. And now a lot more of the country is aware of it.

Darn, that's a crying shame, isn't it?

***To complete the trifecta, we come back to our old friend, Senate Minority Leader Dirty Harry Reid, who has now officially drawn two ethics complaints for his flatulent misexercise of judgment in obliquely blurting possible contents of Michigan Judge Henry Saad's erstwhile "confidential" FBI dossier to which the Nevada Jackass never should have had access in the first place.

The Senate Ethics Committee will investigate Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid based on two separate complaints filed against the Nevada Democrat, the committee's vice chairman said this week.

On Wednesday the Center for Individual Freedom filed a complaint with the committee based on Reid's decision to reveal confidential information from the FBI file of Henry Saad - one of President Bush's judicial nominees.

Asked about the CIF complaint, the Ethics Committee vice chairman, South Dakota Democrat Tim Johnson, told Human Events magazine: "Filing does automatically set off a preliminary investigation, which is usually staff-driven."

On Thursday, the American Conservative Union filed a second ethics complaint against Senator Reid over the Saad incident.

The ACU complaint also cites "improper referencing of confidential materials by Senators Patrick Leahy and Carl Levin."

There is a day-glo obvious common thread running through the follies of Messrs Earle, Dean, and Reid: a totally out-of-control partisan malevolence that precludes the most basic element necessary to succeed at scandalmongering: self-discipline. It is the utter lack of this trait that has served to make the Texas hack prosecutor, DNC figurehead, and Senate Obstructionist-in-Chief the focus of public scrutiny instead of their targets. As a result, Earle has lost all prosecutorial credibility and is under growing pressure to resign himself, Dean probably won't last the year at the DNC, and unless Reid figures out that he'd be better off retreating on the seven Bush appellate court nominees and retain the filibuster for use later this summer when SCOTUS slots open up, he's going to lose his party's last line of defense against renewed erosion of its control of the Judicial Branch.

It makes a fascinating bookend with Watergate, a scandal that none of President Nixon's enemies were expecting and which stunned and astonished them as it fell systematically into their collective lap. Now, thirty-plus years later, the hard left is still trying to recapture that perfect storm, and it is that very effort that has become scandalous and an albatross at the ballot box.

Is it any wonder that none other than Bill Clinton is striking a pose as the voice of reason these days? If the wackos stay on their present course, there may not be much of a party left for him and his wife to retake come 2008.