Say Anything Blog

Given their plunging circulation numbers, you’d think a major scandal (and the subsequent efforts to bury it) would be premium fodder for North Dakota’s newspapers.  But it’s not.

You aren’t likely to read anything like this editorial bemoaning the obstacles thrown in front of efforts to fully investigate the Countrywide scandal on any editorial page in North Dakota.  Because it casts Senator Kent Conrad in a bad light, and that’s a line they’re just not willing to cross.

...such an investigation would shine the light on all the potentially embarrassing details of loans given to, among others, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, Senate budget guru Kent Conrad and the head of the House committee looking into the matter, Edolphus Towns, who has insisted he received no special favors. Thus, Towns held off for weeks on calls from Republicans to issue subpoenas and get some answers.

Among the delaying tactics, Democrats mulled a plan to investigate everybody but congressmen who got special treatment - rules for thee but not for me - abruptly canceled a hearing and snuck out a side door when it looked like the GOP had the votes to get things rolling. At one point, amid a partisan squabble over an ancillary issue, Democrats actually had the locks on the doors to the committee room changed to keep the opposition out.

From where we sit, their efforts to bury this issue are simply unbelievable, especially for a party that returned to power in 2006 riding a wave of voter outrage, in part over Republican ethics scandals. Yet Democrats are proving to be just as tone-deaf now as folks on the right were when they tried to protect Tom DeLay and other embattled congressmen.

In North Dakota, the traditional political commentators in the media put the Countrywide scandal away as soon as the Senate Ethics Committee issued it’s shallow exoneration of Dodd and Conrad without revealing any of the exculpatory evidence they used to reach their decision.  Since then we’ve learned that there were tapes of Senator Conrad negotiating his VIP loan that were never subpoenaed by Congress.  We’ve also watched as Democrats have pulled every sneaky trick in the book, as alluded to above, to avoid investigations.

And yet, the state media remains silent.  Because, again, reporting these things would reflect badly on Senator Conrad.  And they aren’t willing to do that.