Green, Walker in no position to lecture on ethics

Playground Politics, a right-leaning anonymous blog written by a Capitol insider, has an interesting and unexpected take on the Adelman travel case:

... [T]he last people who should be lecturing anyone about ethics are Mark Green and Scott Walker.

Georgia Thompson is a civil servant, not an appointee of the Doyle administration. Those who try to paint Thompson as a Doyle ally are missing the point that she was hired while Scott McCallum was governor. She is not, as Mark Green would have you believe, "an official of Governor Doyle's administration." Doyle had nothing to do with her hiring and Thompson, having passed her review process, has job protection that precludes her from being disciplined prior to the outcome of this case. She can be transferred into another job, and that's about it. And Mark Green, as a former legislator, damn well knows that. This is about as disingenuous as Green calling himself a fiscal conservative after voting for that Medicare prescription drug giveaway.

Scott Walker's release, on the other hand, shows only that the man is incapable of understanding what the indictment actually says. Walker would like to infer that Thompson was pressured into using political considerations in the course of her work, something not indicated anywhere in the actual indictment. Of course, Scott's a college dropout. Should we really expect him to successfully process the contents of a legal document? Probably not...

What's really sanctimonious and full of BS, however, is the Republican criticism of Doyle over the Thompson matter. If we're going to play the guilt by association game, Mark Green's campaign manager was the recipient of a basketful of Jack Abramoff freebies. Green also has yet to return $30K from a fund controlled by also-indicted Rep. Tom DeLay. Scott Walker's old pal and fundraiser Nick Hurtgen is on his way to jail for extortion. Doyle, meanwhile, has a bit of a snafu over at DOA with a state employee he claims to have never met. If that in fact is the case, Doyle is by far the least of the three sinners. Besides, didn't that "last, best offer" by Adelman Travel save the state $30K?

If anything, the Thompson matter shows that everyone running for governor may end up ethically compromised.