Hypocritical Witch Hunt

I'm not excited about partisan bickering. This may sound like that, but it's in fact in response to partisan bickering. It seems to me that the ethics witch hunt against Tom Delay, regardless of whether he has committed ethics violations, is pure politics and not about ethics violations at all. Republicans may be willing to do this as well, so this isn't about Republicans or Democrats. It's just that in this case it seems to me that Democrats are pointing out all these things Tom Delay is accused of doing, and the only reason they're doing it is because he's an influential Republican who's had a lot of success getting Republicans to go along with an agenda far from their own. Instead of fighting the fight of ideas, they simply want to impugn his character.

That might be fine if all the major players who were doing this weren't guilty of the same sorts of things, but the reality is that most politicians do most of these things quite often. Maybe they should hunt Tom Delay down, but if so they also need to do the same with Barbara Boxer, Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, and many others. See this for some specific charges against some of the people who have been vocal about Tom Delay in a way that's at least potentially deserving of the charge of hypocrisy. I'm not going to endorse any one of these charges. The point is that politicians do this all the time, and people selectively comment on it. I'm not saying this because I like Tom Delay. There are a number of things about the man that I don't like, and I wish he and the left would stop pretending he's representative of evangelical Christianity. My point here is simply that there's a worry about hypocrisy in this witch hunt.