On Sestak "job offer," Darrell Issa is being a typical desperate idiotic Republican

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Mike Madden at Salon:

WASHINGTON -- The zeal that Rep. Darrell Issa has brought to his pursuit of the allegations that the White House dangled some kind of job in front of Joe Sestak last year while they were trying to muscle him out of the Pennsylvania Senate primary is impressive, if also a little amusing. Issa, the ranking Republican on the House Oversight Committee, has been thundering about an alleged bribe, using scary words like "impeachable," "crime" and "ethics complaint." (Actually, considering how rarely the House Ethics Committee can be roused to do anything about lawmakers, that last one isn't so scary.)

But as Alex Pareene has already noted, this isn't exactly the first time someone in politics cut a deal for a job. When Sen. Judd Gregg was going to leave Congress to join the Obama administration -- which, in the end, he didn't do, because he realized he disagreed with everything President Obama stands for -- he wasn't going to take the appointment to become commerce secretary unless his replacement in New Hampshire's Senate seat would caucus with the GOP.

So Salon asked Issa's office what, exactly, the difference between the two situations is. At first, Issa's staff insisted they were nothing alike. "That never happened, at the end of the day," Issa spokesman Kurt Bardella said of the Gregg appointment quid pro quo. "It never played out."

That's because Gregg declined the appointment, and never vacated his seat. (Democrats are hoping to seize it in this fall's election, anyway.) But that isn't actually a distinction between the Gregg situation and the Sestak situation, because as it happens, the Sestak scenario "never played out," either; Sestak refused to drop out of the race and wound up winning the nomination. Bardella said that made the Sestak allegations even worse, because if he had taken the job and dropped out, it would have changed the course of an election. And at first, he said Gregg hadn't actually confirmed the contours of the deal the way Sestak had spoken of the offer from the White House.

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