http://www.nationalreview.com/article/385611/politics-combat-andrew-c-mccarthy
It has come to this after six years of Barack Obama’s Chicago-style community-organizer governance: The hard Left no longer believes it necessary to pretend that the rule of law matters. It is politics as combat. The devolution can be measured from the trumped-up indictment of Tom DeLay to the trumped-up indictment of Rick Perry.
Back in 2005, the idea of exploiting prosecutorial power to criminalize one’s political opposition was still sufficiently noxious that Democrat apparatchiks in Austin understood the need for camouflage. Tom DeLay of Texas was among the GOP’s most effective leaders and fundraisers, having risen to congressional leadership not long after he helped Newt Gingrich lead the 1994 GOP takeover of the House. Democrats decided he had to be sidelined. They also knew they had the raw power to make it happen: a political operative ensconced as the chief prosecutor in a reliably Democratic county. In politics as combat, raw power is all you need — just cause has nothing to do with it.
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But nine years ago, it was still unacceptable for the rub-out to look too much like a rub-out. It was not possible to charge DeLay with the non-crime of raising money for Republican candidates — his real offense as far as his adversaries were concerned. So he was indicted for a convoluted money-laundering scheme.
Money laundering is not, as we say in the law biz, a malum in se crime — an offense that is blatantly wrong, like murder or robbery. Money laundering, instead, is malum prohibitum. That is to say, it is an exercise in social engineering: behavior considered criminal only because society (or those who are running society) choose to regulate it narrowly. The details of such “crimes” make normal people’s eyes glaze over.
Some of us legal beagles pointed out, in DeLay’s defense, that his allegedly criminal money transfers did not qualify as money laundering because, at the time he touched the funds in question, they were not proceeds of illegal activity. But as the hard Left anticipated, the reaction to this solid but technical defense to a highly technical offense was a big, collective yawn. As far as the public was concerned, DeLay was charged with money laundering, just like a drug kingpin. He sounded like a terrible guy . . . and to draw a different conclusion would have required more time than most people had to grapple with the allegation and the facts.
