The corruption charges filed this week against Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich and his chief of staff are so brazen in their scope, so peculiarly typical of the "pay to play" mentality of Chicago's machine politics, and so gross in their foul-mouthed particulars that much of the media has ignored an important angle of this story: It’s the most recent in a series of ethical scandals—some involving outright criminality—among elected officials who are Democrats.

My friend Larry Sabato, a politics professor at the University of Virginia, points out in his blog today that corruption is an ancient human vice that knows no party boundaries. Larry is right, as usual, but here is the problem: For the better part of two years, leading Democratic Party officials went around this country lambasting the Bush administration, GOP leaders in Congress, and the Republican Party as a whole for supposedly inculcating a “culture of corruption” in Washington, D.C.

Young Americans—these are the“Millennials who broke nearly 2-1 for Barack Obama—have a linguistic formulation for this kind of smear. It’s calling “hating”—and those who enjoy verbally tearing other people down are “haters.” Many prominent Democrats have done quite a bit of hating in recent times. During the 2006 mid-term elections, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Republicans “immoral” and “corrupt,” and said once that they were “running a criminal enterprise.” Here is a link mentioning some of those comments.

In the 2008 campaign, the Democratic Party’s most egregious “hater” was probably Howard Dean. The Democratic Party chairman simply couldn’t utter that phrase “culture of corruption” often enough. When Dean talked about Republicans, it almost seemed as if he had a weird, partisan form of Tourette’s Syndrome. Earlier this year, Dean saw fit to slime John McCain repeatedly on ethics—based on a dubiously sourced and since discredited New York Times article—that implied by innuendo that McCain had had a sexual relationship with a lobbyist. (The woman in question, incidentally, subsequently told National Journal investigative reporter Edward Pound she’d never been alone with McCain for even a single moment in her life. No evidence exists to the contrary.)

Anyway, here is Howard Dean to Linda Douglass, then with National Journal: “The conservatives are part of this culture of corruption that the Republicans have brought to Washington.”

“Think of all of the people in the Bush Administration that have had to leave office under a cloud,” Dean added, naming Republican congressman Randy Cunningham, who had never been in the administration and who was, in fact, prosecuted by Bush’s Justice Department.  “Now it looks like John McCain is part of the corruption problem in Washington,” Dean also said. “He doesn’t seem to really have an ethical compass. He doesn’t seem to have an instinct about what is the right thing to do and what isn’t the right thing to do.”

Lacks an ethical compass. That’s a helluva thing to say about a man who refused the North Vietnamese offer to leave his prison camp early—despite repeated torture and his life-threatening injuries—because it was against the Navy code of "first-in, first-out" when it comes to prisoners of war. I guess we could talk about Dean’s medical deferment during the Vietnam War that kept him out of the service, but not from skiing, playing intramural football, hiking, or paddling the length of the Connecticut River in a canoe. But that would be “hating,” so let's not.

What I will say is that the Democrats have compiled an impressive body of work in the “culture of corruption” wars themselves. The litany includes:

n      New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, who resigned after taking official state government trips to Washington to consort with high-priced hookers.

n      Rep. William Jefferson, a New Orleans Democrat hit by the feds with felony charges relating to allegations by business partners that he was taking money on the side. An FBI raid on his home turned up $90,000 in cash in a freezer. “Cold Cash” Jefferson was returned to Congress in 2006 while under indictment. He was not so lucky this week, as the voters turned him out of office.

n      Rep. Charles Rangel, Democrat of New York, the charismatic chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, is under the scrutiny of the House Ethics Committee for a series of supposedly sweetheart real estate deals. Rangel insists he’s done nothing wrong, but new allegations keep arising.

n      Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who pleaded guilty to two counts of obstruction of justice last September, and was given a four-month jail sentence.

All in all, it's a reminder that weaknesses of the flesh and the spirit are non-partisan human failings. A more appealing response to our public servants' falls from grace would be for politicians in the other party to withhold their chortling expressions of glee. In this season of the year, what would be best of all are expressions of solicitude for the families of these fallen angels of politics. Usually—and I suppose the current first lady of Illinois is an exception to this rule—they have done nothing wrong. Republicans, are you listening?