Back in November 2006, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed that “the American people voted to restore integrity and honesty in Washington, D.C., and the Democrats intend to lead the most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history.”  On Friday, the US Senate Select Committee on Ethics released a statement indicating that their investigation into the Countrywide mortgages received by Sen. Chris Dodd and Sen. Kent Conrad failed to turn up any evidence of impropriety.   While failing to find any “credible evidence” of ethics violations, the committee did admonish the senators for not being more vigilant in questioning the preferential treatment they were receiving.

Perhaps Speaker Pelosi should criticize her colleagues for their past actions, which certainly seem to fly in the face of her aforementioned claim, before tossing the “un-American” charge at citizens concerned about her plans for “health insurance reform” — instead, she offers another promise:

We are confident that our principles of affordable, quality health care will stand up to any and all critics.

As the idiom goes, “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me”.