Is Pelosi Newting The GOP?

[Annie]

Pretty shrewed analysis:

http://opinionjournal.com/columnists/dhenninger/?id=110009485

WONDER LAND

Speaker Pelosi's Ethics
Targeting the bad people who lead the innocent lambs of Congress astray.

BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, January 5, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST

Ethics in politics is not the same as ethics in real life. Ethics in politics is a martial art. The biggest mistake you can make is thinking that the ethics package proposed by new Speaker Nancy Pelosi is mainly about "cleaning up" politics. Maybe. But it's first of all about cleaning the clocks of the Republicans.

The House Republicans got lazy. Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, earmarks, Duke Cunningham, Bob Ney. When Nancy Pelosi saw the Republicans had developed a compulsion to flagrantly throw their weight around, she grabbed them by the lapels of their Hickey Freeman suits, hoisted them into the air and slammed them onto the House floor, shrieking "the most corrupt Congress in history!" That's right. In history.

Ms. Pelosi started the long road to earning a black belt in political ethics (again, not to be confused with ethics as taught at, say, Aquinas College) back in 1987 by studying the Master--Newt Gingrich. That was the year Nancy Pelosi entered the House as a California freshperson. And that was the year Newt Gingrich turned ethics into a weapon against the imperious Democratic House Speaker Jim Wright, who left in disgrace two years later. "We currently have the least ethical speaker in the 20th Century," said Grandmaster Gingrich. Nancy noticed...