First, he's a
thief:
The counsel on judicial nominations for Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) has resigned in response to a probe of how Republican staff members gained access to Democratic computer files on President Bush's most controversial choices for the federal judiciary. Aides to Frist said the resignation of Manuel Miranda, who has been on leave pending outcome of the inquiry, was accepted last week and takes effect today.
Sen. Orrin Hatch sought a probe on Judiciary Committee computer use. Miranda's resignation comes in the midst of an investigation by the Senate sergeant-at-arms, with help from the Secret Service and forensic experts, into whether GOP staffers improperly or perhaps illegally tapped into Democratic strategy memos on a computer server shared by Judiciary Committee members of both parties. The activity continued for months, and reports of the memos' contents appeared in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times.
The probe was launched after Sens. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) complained that lifting materials from their computer files amounted to theft. Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) joined in their request for an investigation. Hatch made a preliminary inquiry of his own, placed a junior-level committee aide on leave (he subsequently quit and returned to school) and described himself as "mortified that this improper, unethical and simply unacceptable breach of confidential files may have occurred on my watch."
Some conservative advocacy groups have criticized Hatch and denied any impropriety on the part of Miranda and other GOP aides. They said scrutiny should focus instead on contents of the Democratic files.
So is Miranda contrite? Oh my no:
In final conversations, Hatch agreed with me that no ethical rules were violated but resorted to something about "Hatch ethics." Yet remarkably, in both conversations, Hatch urged that more Democrat documents would be made public. He did the same with other staffers.
But let's assume arguendo that Hatch is not a hypocrite. In time, he came to state two worthwhile norms. First, he reminded reporters that gentlemen do not read other gentlemen's mail. This etiquette is attributed to Henry Stimson who organized the precursor to the C.I.A., a fact that suggests the limits of etiquette, and of shallow ethics.
The second Hatch ethic was more revealing. In Committee meetings, he restated the golden rule: we should do to others what we would want others to do to us. I knew, upon hearing this, the solipsistic quality of Hatch's thinking and just how misguided the situation was. The golden rule is indeed a great private ethic, but one that cannot guide those charged with public duty.
A story is passed down among Hatch staffers of Hatch, accompanied by an aide, discovering a certain senator in flagrant with a woman not his wife. Though we know the adulterous senator, to my knowledge we have not leaked it. That is an application, though some might think unfair to the wife, of the golden rule. That is an entirely private matter. The same cannot be with public issues presented by the Democrat memos, or any Republican memos of a similar ilk.
Ethics is worthy of debate, and so I challenge Senator Hatch to debate me publicly on this issue and prove to folks in Utah that 30 years later he has not come to abuse power, or to hide in Senate corners.
Well now, quite the man to be lecturing about "disclosures" no? And what is he doing now? Why he is Frist's outside man leading the extremist charge on the nuclear option.
Frist is a disgrace and any respectable Republican must know by now that the way of Frist is the way of Right Wing Extremists like James Dobson and hypocritical thieves like Manuel Miranda.