It’s pretty sad when you have to bypass Kent Conrad’s home state’s largest newspaper and go all the way to New York and the nation’s most liberal newspaper to find some fair and critical analysis of his dealings in the Countrywide scandal.

Time and again, the Senate is bedeviled by its own clubbiness, its lost sensitivity to how ordinary people live their lives. So it is with Christopher Dodd and Kent Conrad, who turned up on the “Friends of Angelo” V.I.P. list at Countrywide Financial Corporation.

Countrywide, a home-loan powerhouse, figures prominently in the subprime mortgage crisis, which has put hundreds of thousands of Americans at risk of losing their homes. The revelations about Mr. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, and Mr. Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota, are particularly troubling since the two senators are principals in trying to pass emergency legislation to address the damage from the mortgage crisis. . . .

The Senate ethics committee has opened an investigation to see whether gift rules have been violated. The trouble is, that throws the matter back to the clubby world of the Senate. Given its track record, it is hard to believe the committee will find that Mr. Dodd and Mr. Conrad acted improperly.

It’s not even clear that the Senate these days is in touch enough to understand how terrible this home-loan back-scratching looks. Senator Conrad said that of 10 or so mortgages he obtained over the years, “in every one of those instances I talked with the No. 1 or No. 2 person” at the lender. Just like the rest of us.

Ouch.  Particularly funny in light of this passage from a story about this scandal in the Fargo Forum:

In the past several days, [Conrad has] fired off stern letters to The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Bismarck Tribune, blasting them for “breathtaking … disregard for the facts” and “serious inaccuracies” in their editorials criticizing him for something he has said he never sought or knew he had.

I guess Conrad better fire up the old typewriter for another stern letter.  This one going to the New York Times.

Meanwhile, you’ll find no mention of Conrad’s backing of the legislation benefiting Countrywide anywhere in the North Dakota media.  They, apparently, don’t consider that inconvenient-for-Kent-Conrad fact to be newsworthy.