We’ve seen how Tea Party Movement, Sarah Palin and Talk Radio have been blamed for the shooting of Congress woman Gabrielle Giffords. But another event this week is also deeply disturbing–the sentencing of Tom Delay.  He has been convicted of money laundering and sentenced to three years.  I searched two pages of Google before coming across an NRO article that explains Tom Delay’s crime: he had soft money exchanged for hard money so as to elect Republicans in the state of Texas.  According to Republican strategist Ralph Reed, this commonly practiced and it is not illegal; he writes:

If DeLay’s operatives made any mistake at all, it was being too good at negotiating: They exchanged the funds dollar-for-dollar.This even exchange enabled prosecutors to later claim the funds were “laundered.” But money laundering requires an underlying crime. There was nothing illegal about supporting state House candidates with the funds so exchanged, and the transaction was reported publicly by both DeLay’s state committee and the RNC.

Reed says that this conviction will not likely withstand appeal.  And yet the judge in the case claims it is not about politics.  But it is about $190,000 of soft corporate money that was swapped for hard money sent to candidates in Texas.  That’s politics, isn’t it.

In my opinion, this is all about the Left, having lost the war of public opinion, using the courts and the media to destroy the lives of conservatives.  The criminal cases against Senator Ted Stevens, Scooter Libby, and Sir Conrad Black were of the same stuff.  This is a disturbing trend, which is more reminiscent of totalitarianism than of free countries.