If only liberals were half as angry at the people who flew planes into our skyscrapers as they are with Tom DeLay, we might have two patriotic parties in this country.

Any Republicans who didn’t ferociously defend Tom DeLay — which is to say, the president, almost all Republicans in Congress, and alleged conservative writers trying to impress the editorial board of The New York Times — better hope liberals never come after them. The only proven method for a Republican to avoid having his name turned into a liberal malediction is to be completely ineffective. You’ll notice there’s no “Stop Lamar Alexander Before It’s Too Late” Web site.

Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Ed Meese, Oliver North, Clarence Thomas, Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove, Tom DeLay, Dick Cheney — all these men saw their names used as curse words.

Only one of them was ever indicted. To wit, the comical indictment of DeLay recently won by political hack Ronnie Earle. In order to get that indictment, Earle had to empanel six grand juries in Austin, Texas, which is like the Upper West Side with more attractive people.

Liberals spit out all these names with more venom than they’ve ever been able to muster for names like “Saddam Hussein” and “Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.”

Even proud American corporations find their names being turned into curse words by liberals, such as “Halliburton,” which is currently losing money in Iraq in order to supply food to our troops — you know, the same troops liberals pretend to love (but don’t lose money feeding).

I spent a couple of hours listening to liberal hate radio this week to try to figure out what crime Tom DeLay is even alleged to have committed. But all I heard was the name “Tom DeLay” and “PRISON!” mentioned in the same sentence over and over again.

Back when Newt Gingrich still scared liberals, the House Ethics Committee spent years probing various charges against him, focusing on the charge that a college class he taught was … partisan! Meanwhile, they’re teaching Marxism in comp lit classes, Islamic terrorism in Indian experience classes, and Druidism in divinity classes. As we speak, freshmen in English 101 classes all over the country are rushing to complete their term papers on how all heterosexual sex is rape. Over a million dollars later, the committee cleared Gingrich when it realized: Wait a second. This is a college class!

But at the urging of the Democrats, the Internal Revenue Service spent 3 1/2 years investigating Gingrich’s college course. After all the hullabaloo, the result was: No crime. No partisanship even. The classes “were not biased toward particular politicians or a particular party” — thus distinguishing Gingrich’s class from every other college course in America.

To the contrary, Gingrich’s college class spent more time praising FDR and JFK than Reagan. (Did you know that FDR’s radio broadcast after Pearl Harbor included an eight-minute prayer? You would have learned that in Newt’s course.)

But the mere mention of the name “Gingrich” was proof of criminal conduct in the ’90s.

When Democrats are accused of wrongdoing, it’s usually something more like what most people think of as a crime, say, punching a Capitol Hill policeman.

Or perhaps by being captured on tape in hotel rooms stuffing wads of cash into their pockets from Arab sheiks — as Democrats were caught doing in the Abscam investigation in the 1980s. Inasmuch as this was back when Democrats controlled Congress, that body responded to shocking proof of criminality by their colleagues by … investigating the FBI for having investigated members of Congress.

The “rule of law” means something entirely different for Republicans and Democrats. Rarely does a perfect test case present itself, but with Ronnie Earle, we have a prosecutor who was once faced with the same possible wrongdoing by a Republican office-holder and a Democrat office-holder at the same time.

In the midst of Ronnie Earle’s witchhunt of Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison for allegedly using her government office for campaign purposes in 1994 — begun days after she was elected to the U.S. Senate by a 2-1 margin — employees in former Democratic Gov. Ann Richards’ office admitted that they destroyed almost three years’ worth of long-distance billing records that were supposed to be preserved — to ensure the office wasn’t being used for campaign purposes, among other things.

According to the Austin American-Statesman, Earle promptly “cleared (Richards) and her staff of wrongdoing, saying there was no evidence of criminal intent.”

Conservatives live under a jurisprudence of laws, but they get prosecuted under liberals’ jurisprudence of epithets.

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