Many left-leaning critics have responded to reports of Democratic Illinois Governor Blagojevich’s blatant corruption scandal by highlighting Republican corruption scandals that led to sweeping electoral defeats in he 2006 Congressional elections.  These observations are certainly valid, as political corruption knows no party.  But that only serves to call into sharper relief the Democrats’ true problem here — they made so very much hay out of Republican corruption scandals, with Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi bragging about Democrats providing the “most ethical Congress in history” by way of contrast, that the growing string of venal corruption by Democrats compounds itself by adding on hypocrisy and unwarranted arrogance.

And Michelle Malkin has her rhetorical scalpel out for some payback after all the self-righteous trumpeting by Democrats for the last several years:

Democrats and the media can no longer rest on the old rationalization that Blago is an exception to the “we’re cleaner than thou” rule. 2008 was the year of Democratic Reps. William “Cold Cash” Jefferson, Charlie “Sweetheart Deals” Rangel, and former Detroit Mayor Kwame “Text Me” Kilpatrick. It was the year Democratic Massachusetts State Senator Dianne Wilkerson got caught stuffing bribes from an FBI informant down her shirt. It was the year 12 Democratic leaders and staffers in Pennsylvania’s state Capitol were stung in a massive corruption scandal involving cash, sex and abuse of public office. And it was the year of multimillion-dollar embezzlement scandals at Democratic satellite offices of ACORN and the SEIU.

The Democrats have met the culture of corruption, and it looks like it ain’t just elephants among the jackasses soiling public office.

Alas, it seems that whenever either party gains power to a degree that insulates it from effective institutional opposition and/or scrutiny by the media, some of its members are perfectly willing to assume that the rules of law no longer apply to them. Contrary to the pretensions of Democratic leaders (and bloggers) for the last 5 years, the pathology of corruption is not limited to Republicans. Yet, it is their prior insistence that it was an exclusively Republican sin that makes them ineffective in trying to redirect attention this time, especially since most conservative bloggers readily concede that corruption is a bipartisan problem.

Note to Democrats: When you overreach in trying to cast yourself as morally better than everyone that disagrees with you, it only serves to make the inevitable fall from grace harder to bear and make it harder to redirect attention by shifting the subject.