Press fawns over Fitzgerald, but Starr was part of the VRWC

The Washington Post this morning has a detailed and complimentary piece posted about Plamegate ‘leak’ prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. A snippet:

He registered to vote in New York as an independent. When he discovered that Independent was a political party, he re-registered with no affiliation. Illinois citizens know him for pursuing Republicans and Democrats with equal fervor. Former Gov. George Ryan (R) is on trial on corruption charges, and a growing number of aides to Mayor Richard M. Daley (D) face influence-peddling charges.

Fitzgerald sounds like an above-the-board guy – I’ve seen good things written about him at conservative sites like National Review. My beef isn’t with Fitzgerald, but with the MSM, who are making sure that – before the indictments (if any) are handed down in the Plamegate case – we know what a fair and honest guy Fitzgerald is so once (if) any indictments are handed down, we’ll know that they were done by a guy who’s credentials are impeccable. They are doing similar things with regard to Ronnie Earle, especially considering the articles that were written about Earle that included the fact that he had prosecuted more Dems than Republicans – as if that’s supposed to mean he doesn’t have a partisan ax to grind with Tom DeLay.

But remember how the press portrayed Ken Starr during his investigations into Clinton’s, uh, misdeeds? The prevailing sentiment in the press was that Starr was just yet another member of the VRWC out to get Clinton – thereby his credibility could be questioned in the event that he ever got the goods on Clinton (which he eventually did). Yet years earlier, when he was handpicked by Democrats to investigate disgraced Republican Senator Bob Packwood’s sexual misconduct, Ken Starr was the cat’s meow (Jonah Goldberg noted this reversal in opinion on Ken Starr in a March 2002 piece at NRO).

See a pattern here? I do. Same stuff, different day – courtesy of our untrustworthy, liberally biased MSM.

More: John Hawkins at Right Wing News makes some great points on le affair de Plame worth repeating:

On the other hand, there has been absolutely no evidence up to this point, not one single shred, that Patrick Fitzgerald has been unfair or politically motivated. Nor would bringing perjury or obstruction of justice charges be evidence of bias either. Anyone who works in the White House should know better than to lie under oath or get involved in a cover-up, and if they did something that foolish, then they should expect to be charged with a crime.

That’s not to say that Patrick Fitzgerald is beyond criticism, but conservatives should be very careful not to go down the same contemptible road that the Clinton administration did with Ken Starr. While in all fairness, Kay Bailey Hutchinson cannot be accused of the same sort of contemptible partisan sliming that the Clintons and their allies aimed at Starr, it seems to me that her comments are a step in that direction. That is not the sort of behavior Republicans should engage in…

Indeed.

(Cross-posted at Blogs For Bush)