FAIRLY UNBALANCED

At long last the mainstream press corps are admitting they dropped the ball in covering the early W. years and the infamous run-up to the Iraq war. Now, however, they say the full scrutiny of news organizations is in play. What a crock of shit.

Last night all the major TV news organizations had fancy graphics saying something like, "An Air of Corruption," framed by a red elephant and a blue donkey. After all, like Fox News, they wanted to be "fair and balanced."

Let's see, regarding corruption on the Republican side, we had Jack Abramoff (the corrupt lobbyist who admitted a vast majority of ties with Republican congressmen and White House officials), former California Rep. Randy Cunningham (now in the slammer for taking bribes in exchange for lucrative contracts), former Majority leader, Tom Delay (awaiting trial for money laundering), Representative Mark Foley (for soliciting sex with Congressional boy aids), soon-to-be former Speaker Dennis Hastert (who had illicit ties with Abramoff and headed the Foley cover-up), and the nepotism cases involving Rep John Doolittle's wife/consultant's huge fees, and of course, Rep. Curt Weldon's daughter (whose home was raided to gather evidence her father directed lucrative contracts to her firm.

And to balance this, the news organizations trotted out Democrat Harry Reid, who allegedly used campaign money to tip the doormen at his Washington condo. Wow. Harry Reid was trying to gain influence over the doorman! This warranted the little blue donkey icon on the TV news "Corruption" graphic.

Well, I see the news organizations' point. After all, Harry Reid, through his ethics failure, could now expect to:

1. Have the door held better for him
2. Have his umbrella blow dried
3. Have the route to the elevator Mapquested
4. Have guests announced without attitude
5. Have special cones to indicate freshly mopped floors

I'm so glad that Republican corruption was balanced out with Harry Reid's tipping indiscretion.

Fair and balanced, of course, doesn't extend to the ridiculous. If one were doing a contemporaneous story on the holocaust, one wouldn't leave the pits of Auschwitz to get Joseph Goebbels' take on why the genocide was warranted.

At the same time, as much as Republicans would have you believe it, an extramarital affair with an adult intern is not the impeachable equivalent to lying about a war that, by some estimates, has cost as many as a half million lives. Have the inmates truly taken over the news asylum?

As Democrats are poised to take control of Congress, we are starting to hear muffled threats about the dire political consequences of impeaching a sitting president during wartime. As Republicans continue to testify against one other, let the stuck pigs squeal.