Doing the Scampering Dance of Joy

In a complete surprise to just about nobody, a Texas prosecutor indicted House Majority Leader Tom DeLay for conspiracy to evade campaign-finance laws. I've stated it before, and I'll state it again: I'm no fan of DeLay, and I tend to believe his damn-the-torpedoes approach is counterproductive in the long run. But my beef here is twofold:

1. The mainstream media is doing a little too much exulting. I confess that I did a little happy dance that day Bill Clinton was forced to admit, quite candidly, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman," so I know exultation when I see it. The news outlets are positively aswim with stories saying things such as Reuters'

   The indictment of House No. 2 Tom DeLay on Wednesday added to a growing list of political woes for Republicans ahead of next year's congressional elections, providing new fuel for Democratic charges that Republicans have been corrupted by power.

   This was the first paragraph of the linked story. I'm not surprised, but I am a little upset give how much I feel the MSM has bent over backwards in the past to preserve a little innocent-until-proven-guilty feeling for Democrats.
   
2. But more than that, there is the automatic dismissal of the charge that the prosecution is politically motivated. Indeed, the linked story rehashes the old "rebuttal" that DA Earle has prosecuted more Democrats than Republicans. Maybe, but his abortive prosecution of Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison in 1993, which was so thin he he was forced to drop it. But apart from all this, here we have a man who, in May 2005, came within a hair's breadth of referring to DeLay and his associates as "Mussolini and his fascists."

I'll let this thing sort itself out in the courts. I just wish the media would take a breath and try to do the same thing.