A very real difference between Democrats and Republicans

When Republicans in government are found to have committed crimes in connection with their positions, other Republicans and their wingnut lackeys rally around them. From Tom DeLay to Scooter Libby to the hundreds in between, a huge web of apologists rallies around them. Even now, after the CIA has confirmed that Valerie Plame was covert, and at times NOC, wingnuts on messageboards are insisting that they know better, that because she drove to Langley, she couldn't have been covert. Fred Thompson has been lobbying for a pardon of Scooter Libby. The Republican tactic is deny, deny, deny, and spin for the media. Party loyalty trumps everything -- including the law.

Democrats handle things a bit differently. Perhaps not as sweepingly as we might like, but at least they don't rally en masse to the defense of felons:

Democratic leaders in the House moved quickly to distance themselves from Mr. Jefferson, with some lawmakers calling for his resignation. Speaker Nancy Pelosi intends to convene a leadership meeting this week, aides said, to discuss taking away Mr. Jefferson’s seat on the Small Business Committee, his only remaining assignment.

“The charges in the indictment against Congressman Jefferson are extremely serious,” Ms. Pelosi said in a statement. “While Mr. Jefferson, just as any other citizen, must be considered innocent until proven guilty, if these charges are proven true, they constitute an egregious and unacceptable abuse of public trust and power.”

Last year, Ms. Pelosi drew criticism from the Congressional Black Caucus for removing Mr. Jefferson from his seat on the powerful Ways and Means panel. After he won re-election last year, Democratic leaders sought to appoint him to the Homeland Security Committee, but Republican leaders threatened to block the appointment and debate it on the House floor in the early months of the Democratic majority. He was not named to the committee.

Democratic aides said the House would almost certainly not vote to expel or censure Mr. Jefferson until his case had played out in court. The last member of the House to be expelled, aides said, was Representative James A. Traficant Jr., an Ohio Democrat, after a criminal conviction on bribery and racketeering charges in 2002.

In the midterm elections last year, Democrats campaigned on a pledge to remove the “culture of corruption” that they said had been a practice of the Republican majority.

The indictment of Mr. Jefferson, which had been expected by Democratic leaders, threatened to sully the party’s promise to bring an ethics overhaul to the 110th Congress.

The indictment also accused Mr. Jefferson of violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, making him the first sitting lawmaker to be charged under the law.

He is accused of offering to bribe an unidentified Nigerian official in exchange for assistance with business activities in which Mr. Jefferson and several other unidentified family members had a financial interest.

It would be far better for this country if both Republicans and Democrats could agree that criminal conduct is not to be tolerated, whether it benefits a party's power or not. Perhaps if the law and the benefit of the country trumped politics, this president and his vice-president would be out of office by now and a few thousand more American soldiers might still be alive.