Are Republicans Allergic to Ethics?

Has the weight of public scorn heaped on the Republicans for their lies and corruption finally pressured them to stop treating ethics as if it were radioactive? Yesterday, the Republicans finally caved in and allowed the House Ethics Committee to be activated. Why did it take this long? Well, in January as they were being sworn in to a new term, the Republicans in one of their first actions, attempted to impose rule changes to the Ethics Committee that would essentially render it powerless. Then to be on the safe side, the Republicans turned on their own. They replaced committee chairman Rep. Joel Hefley (R-Colo) who was considered more interested in ethical standards than partisan coverups ,with a new chairman more closely tied to the Republican leadership cabal. Why did they feel changes were needed? Well, the committee chastised Tom DeLay (R-Hades) THREE times last year, and this year he was facing much more serious charges relating to illegally raising money to hijack more House seats in Texas, travelling around the world illegally on lobbyist paid golf tours, etc, etc, etc. This doesn't consider the issue of how can self-respecting office holders allow themselves to be bullied into retaining a leader with such obvious disregard for ethical standards. We all know that Delay's a prodigious fund raiser and funnels huge wads of campaign cash to those House members who remain loyal to him. But don't you sometimes reach a point, Republicans, when simple decency is more important than money? Nah, I didn't think so.
Will the newly constituted Ethic Committee spend all its time investigating DeLay? No way! The party of "Ethical rules, we don't need no stinking ethical rules" has plenty of other bench players ready to move into the starting line up of political corruption. Take Duke Cunningham (R-Military Industrial Complex) a House member who obstensibly represents San Diego. As a member of House committees dealing with defense appropriations he attracted a lot of attention from defense contractors. One defense contractor apparently liked Duke's home in San Diego so much that he bought in from him for $1.6 million dollars. This certainly doesn't seem like an outrageous sum for a home in that area. But what the Ethics Committee might want to look into is that the house went up for sale 9 months later for $900,000. Now, I don't spend a lot of time keeping up with the California real estate market , but I don't recall any crash last year. In fact, I believe San Diego real estate prices were UP about 25%. Maybe there's nothing that stinks about this deal and the defense contractor just made a bad deal, or maybe he let his teenage kids have parties there and they trashed the place. Finding the real reasons for suspicious transactions like this is what the Ethics Committee is for. Investigations by a real committee will find out all the facts, including the fact that Duke lives on a yacht while in DC that is owned by the same defense contractor who bought his house.