The Ethics Scoreboard tries very hard to avoid aiming a disproportional amount of ethics criticism at one side of the political spectrum or the other, though it does not maintain any kind of a quota system. The desire to avoid bias becomes a bias itself, however, and after a period (several periods, actually) in which Republican Congressmen have earned a lot of ethical black marks, the temptation is strong to give the GOP a break and look for unethical Democrats. Usually, the urge passes. The other side will eventually catch up, and even pull ahead for a time. Unethical conduct knows no political preferences.

Looking back on 2005, this fact becomes clearer than ever. The race between Republican and their allies and Democrats and their allies for "most unethical" is ending in a photo finish, which is nothing for either party to celebrate. The nature of the unethical conduct differs significantly between the parties, to be sure. Most of the Republican misconduct has been in the realm of abusing power and influence, since that party has the power and influence to abuse. Most of the Democrat misconduct has been committed in efforts to acquire power and influence. But elected officials from both parties have repeatedly and consistently breached their duties to the public by putting the objectives of political combat above the best interests of the country, no matter how one defines it.

The Democrats

The Scoreboard is disappointed and alarmed by the frequency and enthusiasm with which Democrats have embraced the "Big Lie" tactic in 2005. This is the opinion manipulation device championed by Adolph Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, although they were hardly the first to make use of it, just the most detestable. For those of you who haven't read your copy of "Mien Kampf" recently, a "Big Lie" is an outrageous falsehood that gains power and credibility from its very audaciousness. The trick is to repeat the lie over and over again despite a lack of evidence, proof, or logic to support it. If the target of the lie responds to it, even to deny it convincingly, the lie gains both legitimacy and publicity. If the target ignores the lie, it festers and grows.

"Big Lies" are effective, as the Nazis proved, and they have been effective for the Democrats, who have employed two against the administration of George W. Bush to devastating effect. The first of these was that the inept Federal response to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina was in part the result of racist indifference to the suffering of African Americans. While few party leaders were direct in fostering this slander (Party Chairman Howard Dean was a notable… and telling… exception), groups allied with the party were vocal in making the insinuation. In this they were bolstered by the pointed remarks of New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, a black Democrat whose performance in every aspect of the Katrina catastrophe was at least as inadequate as that of the Federal Government. Though a large number of white citizens suffered equally from the bureaucratic incompetence and delays, and though the accusation made logical sense only from a paranoid viewpoint, no prominent Democrats did what they had a duty to do, which was to publicly and aggressively reject the charge on behalf of the U.S. Government. Instead, they stood mute, reaping partisan benefits as irresponsible journalists like CNN's Aaron Brown raised the issue nightly and it flourished on the internet. Today a majority of African Americans actually believe that their government left black citizens suffering in the wake of a hurricane because it wanted to. Anyone who believes that this is a development that can in any way benefit the country should send their thanks to the Democratic leadership.

The second "Big Lie" was and is being pushed aggressively by all levels of the Democratic Party, and has been for more than a year. That lie, of course, is the assertion that Bush and his administration lied about the existence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction in order to justify an invasion. This one even has a protester ditty to go with it ("Bush Lied, People Died"), and it is equally as outrageous as the first. The Annenberg Center's factcheck.org website exhaustively debunked the accusation, but simply reviewing past statements by many current Democrat proponents of the smear, especially Senator Kerry, as well as examining the conclusions of the Clinton Administration on the same topic would suffice to prove its falsity to any fair and logical observer. No matter how inexcusably wrong CIA intelligence proved to be on the matter, no matter how strongly the Bush Administration was determined to go into Iraq for other reasons (all at least arguably valid), no matter how much the Administration may have over-sold the intelligence it had, there is every reason to conclude that President Bush and high ranking officials, plus the military and intelligence communities, international intelligence agencies, most Senators and Representatives from both parties and quite possibly Saddam Hussein himself, honestly believed that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction and were in the process of acquiring the means to develop nuclear weapons.

For Democrats to maintain otherwise is a lie, because they know the accusation it isn't true. Once again, they have been aided and abetted by many voices in the media. A cartoon that ran in the country's most read newspaper, USA Today, showed two GIs in Iraq reading accounts of the Valerie Plame CIA leak indictment against Vice President Cheney's aide "Scooter" Libby. One soldier asks the other what it is all about (still a good question, after two years), and the soldier answers, "Libby lied and we may die." In a word: Huh? Libby's indictable offense involves allegedly lying to investigators about whether and when he discussed the identity of former Ambassador Joe Wilson's wife with the press. Libby's lie, which if the indictment is correct was a lie, occurred long after troops were committed to Iraq and had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction. Libby's lie couldn't cause anyone to die, soldiers or not. But this is the feature of "Big Lies" that Goebbels found so attractive. Once the lie has been thoroughly circulated, even unrelated information will be seen by the paranoid, the biased, the inattentive and the unintelligent as supporting it. Thus "Scooter" Libby's lie to a Federal investigator becomes "proof" that Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction.

This "Big Lie" has also worked. Nearly half of all Americans now believe it, according to polls.

From the Scoreboard's vantage point, its near pathological dislike of the Bush administration has brought the Democratic Party to an all-time low in integrity and principle. Democrats began Bush's tenure with an effort to de-legitimize his administration with one "Big Lie" (that Bush "stole" the 2000 election, when the evident truth was that he was simply the luckiest presidential candidate in US history), and have used two more to undermine his popular support, although there have been abundant legitimate issues available to accomplish the same objective honorably and honestly.

One of those issues that could easily be exploited by an opposition party with any claim to integrity itself is the shocking ethical rot displayed in 2005 by President Bush's party and its leadership. The GOP didn't traffic in "Big Lies," just scores of smaller ones, plus almost every other form of corruption and unethical conduct imaginable. Thus the party bears a considerable amount of the blame for creating fertile ground for the successful "Big Lie" strategy of its opposition.

The Republicans will attempt to counter charges of an ethical vacuum with the argument that individual anomalies among GOP office holders, such as the astoundingly corrupt (and ineptly corrupt!) Representative Randy "Duke' Cunningham, are not representative of the party as a whole. It won't wash.

At the Executive level, President Bush refused to demand accountability for the botched CIA intelligence on Iraq and the prisoner abuse scandal. Vice President Cheney, meanwhile, essentially endorsed torture, which violated core American values embodied in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, as a valid tool in the "War against Terror." The investigation regarding who, if anyone, "leaked" the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame dragged out for months, while all President Bush needed to do to end the matter was to demand that whoever was involved step forward. These are inexcusable for a White House that had pledged to require the "highest standard" of ethical conduct. The opposite was true: after "Scooter" Libby resigned in the wake of his indictment for obstructing justice, he was invited to Vice President Cheney's official Christmas party---a most inappropriate show of support for an alleged law-breaker.

The GOP leadership of the House of Representatives, meanwhile, intentionally paralyzed the House Ethics Committee, allowing a welter of unethical conduct to go unstopped, unacknowledged and unpunished. This was because the Majority Leader's own conduct made shady political dealings the norm. Currently under indictment in Texas for money laundering, Tom DeLay's worst entanglements are only now coming to the fore, as lobbyist and DeLay crony Jack Abramoff's web of influence peddling and under-the-table cash further unravels daily. A Republican Congressman from Ohio, Bob Ney, is already the focus of a criminal investigation stemming from Abramoff's dealings. DeLay also crossed professional ethics borders into misconduct when he used threatening language to criticize the judiciary following a string of legal decisions he didn't approve of. After he was forced to step down as House Majority Leader, the GOP's Whip, Missouri's Roy Blunt, took over. Blunt married a lobbyist whose employer's pet projects he supported while he was wooing her. It's probably a step up from DeLay, but that's no compliment. San Diego's now ex-Rep. Cunningham, of course, set some kind of a record for brazen corruption in 2005, living on a lobbyist's boat, letting another buy his house at an inflated price, and accepting thousands of dollars worth or other "enticements." At the head of the GOP Senate, Bill Frist was setting records of his own, violating medical ethics by diagnosing Terri Schiavo without examining her, ignoring government ethics by permitting GOP-led committees to subpoena a semi-conscious woman (Schiavo again) in order to interfere with a legal court order, and possibly violating insider trading laws with his extraordinarily well-timed dump of his stock shares in the family business. Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska added a note of greed and lack of compassion to the unsavory Republican ethics mix, as he used all his muscle to avoid shifting resources from Alaska pork projects (such as the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere") to Louisiana recovery funding. Prominent state Republican leaders also had bad years in the ethics department. It was discovered that California Governor Schwarzenegger had been on the payroll of bodybuilding magazines even as he officially opposed legislation to regulate the same magazine's primary advertisers: nutritional supplement manufacturers. Ohio's Republican Governor Taft actually pled guilty to accepting expensive and prohibited gifts from lobbyists, and yet didn't have the courage or decency to resign.

Pick your poison, choose your partner: one party lacks honesty and accountability, the other lacks integrity and fairness. Both parties, with a few lonely exceptions (such as Senator McCain on the Republican side and Senator Lieberman among the Democrats) lack that key character trait and catalyst for ethical conduct, courage. The Scoreboard has its ideological and policy preferences, but ethically, there is no winner here. Only losers, with the American public in a position to be the biggest loser of all unless those in power begin exemplifying ethical values rather than distorting them.

If we don't demand it, it will never happen.