Did you happen to see the "liberal" New York Times' editorial page this morning? See the op-ed from one Scot M. Faulkner?

Faulkner was the chief administrative officer of the House of Representatives from 1995 to 1997, according to the Times. Hmm ... that would mean he was the guy the Republicans put in charge of things around then. No?

And how does he start his column? Why, he says this in the second paragraph:

"... if the new Democratic majority functions anything like the old one, they — and we — are in for trouble. The Democrats’ previous administration of Congress was amazingly dysfunctional — an operation that allowed the least ethically inclined members to rob the place blind, as both the House Bank and Post Office scandals confirmed."

Faulkner then describes a system with little financial accountability, one in which Members of Congress could get everything from hair styling to printing done essentially for free, and without anything like proper financial controls to see what it was costing taxpayers.

Let's concede all of that, every word. Let's say that back then, there had been a monumental failure to install proper internal financial controls, and so "the least ethical" of Congressmen could get away with a lot of sleazy things.

The entire budget for Congress was something like $1 billion annually. A big number, and perhaps one larded with waste. Concede it all.

But was Congress really "amazingly dysfunctional?" More dysfunctional than, say, a Congress that was completely sold out to K Street? More dysfunctional than the INCREDIBLE fraud and corruption we've seen from the Republicans, from guys like DeLay, Ney, and all the rest? Really?

By what measure?

It sure couldn't be in terms of absolute dollars, because getting a free haircut every week just doesn't compare to the wheelbarrows of money that DeLay was pushing around.

Adjusted for inflation, perhaps? No, even if you devalued more recent corruption to equal 1994 dollars, I'll bet all the fraud in the House -- combined -- wouldn't add up to squat.

In fact, I well remember the House banking and post office scandals. The "banking" scandal was, in truth, close to nothing at all: a cudgel used by Newt Gingrich -- a clinical narcissistic sociopath, in my view -- to bash on Democrats, but actually no respectable scandal at all. It was THEIR money they were playing with (direct deposits of Congressional salaries), and the actual "malfeasance" was trivial ... nothing more than free floats on cash advances, as I recall, always covered by the deposits of OTHER Congress critters. The post office scandal had a more bite, as I recall, but nonetheless was also ultimately trivial in absolute dollar terms.

But, then, over-stating Democratic splinters while ignoring their own timbers is an old and honored GOP tendency. Witness how Gingrich hounded Wilbur Wright out of the Speaker's position over a (tiny) sale of books to lobbyists ... then turned around with a multi-million dollar contract for his own books that was pure bribery.

If this guy Faulkner had focused his writing more specifically on the actual frauds that occurred ... if he'd declared that any fraud is too much fraud, and that the Democrats should really strive to keep it clean ... if he emphasized nothing more than just good, basic accountant practices ... why, I'd take him quite seriously. But he starts with broad-brush accusations against the Democrats of that day, not exactly saying that they were "every bit as corrupt as today's Republicans," but implying it strongly. His evidence: their accounting systems were woefully out of date (handwritten ledgers: the horror, the horror!!!!), warehouses full of office furnishings not properly inventoried (but, gee, not stolen either. Is that corruption or a failure to have good accountants on staff?), and -- of course -- the unsupported assertion that the House banking scandal "proves" they were all corrupt.

Now, again, I don't actually object to what this man is arguing for. He cites -- correctly -- the benefits that came when proper financial controls were introduced. He says that the GOP eventually moved away from the goal of true transparency, however, and that this would be a good thing for the Democrats to resume. Agreed! And I absolutely agree with him that if the Democrats are wise enough to implement these kinds of reforms, and stick with them, their ability to retain office (and, perhaps, full control of Congress) will be significantly enhanced. It could conceivably buy many more years of real control of Congress.

But why did the Times think it okay to allow this guy to over-state the corruption of the Democrats in power prior to Newt Gingrich? Because that is EXACTLY what he does. It's infuriating and, interestingly, might just ultimately undermine his stated goals a bit. I'd like to think that were I in Congress, I'd be willing to listen to this advice even if it came replete with gross misrepresentations about what my Party used to do. But I can also imagine a lot of Democrats just tuning it out entirely after the first couple of paragraphs.

P.S. -- Before posting, I realized I need to give an example of how Faulkner should have written this. Without asserting anything about the pre-Gingrich leadership, he should have said that in the period 1995-97, a bi-partisan effort (spurred by the claims of corruption against the Democrats) was launched to modernize House financial operations. THEN he could have said, "Those operations had grown steadily more dysfunctional over the decades, and by the time I arrived the entire edifice was obsolete and crumbling" THEN he could have cited all his examples, and pointed out that in such an environment any Congressman inclined to corruption found it easy to be corrupt. (Notice how we never hear about all the sleazy benefits the REPUBLICANS were helping themselves to back then? But, of course, they were. The rules didn't just apply to Democrats).

The scale and scope -- and institutionalization -- of corruption in the recent Republican Congresses goes well beyond anything that existed in any previous Congress in my political memory. Whether they will be judged to be among the most corrupt ever is for future historians to determine, but they were certainly extremely bad, and any attempt, such as Faulkner's, to imply an equivalence with the Democratic Congresses of the recent past is just ludicrous -- especially when you consider the ideological blinkers the Republicans operated with and the absurdities their ideology foisted on us.