In early 2006, dubious spending by both entities came under sharp scrutiny by the American Prospect (where I was then the investigative editor) and the Philadelphia Daily News, which jointly published a two-part examination of Santorum's tangled finances by reporter/blogger Will Bunch.

What Bunch found wasn't very edifying, especially for a politician who had just been named to rewrite ethics rules for the Senate Republicans in the aftermath of the Jack Abramoff scandal. The Operation Good Neighbor Foundation, billed by Santorum as a "compassionate conservative" project to uplift the poor, was raking in money but spending most of the proceeds on overhead, salaries and fundraising, with relatively little devoted to actual charitable endeavors:

A review of federal tax returns filed by the foundation for 2001, 2002, and 2003 shows that the charity spent just 35.9 percent of the nearly $1 million raised on its charitable grants, while spending 56.5 percent on expenses like salaries, fund-raising commissions, travel, conference costs, and rent. Charity experts say that charitable groups should spend at least 75 percent of their money on program grants, and that donors should beware of organizations that spend as little as Santorum's has.

"The majority of organizations are able to meet that 75 percent figure," says Saundra Miniutti of Charity Navigator, a watchdog group. Without addressing Santorum's charity specifically, she noted that nonprofits spending in the range of just one-third on programs are "extremely inefficient."

Moreover, the foundation is not registered with the Pennsylvania Department of State. A spokeswoman for the state agency said that any charity that solicits and raises more than $25,000 in Pennsylvania is required by law to register. Records included on the foundation's 2002 tax filing list $94,000 in donations from sources in the state. State law says that violators of the registration law run the risk of civil penalties and possible legal action by the state.

The list of 2002 donors -- displayed on a Web page marked "not open to public inspection" -- includes several major donors to Santorum's political campaign. Most notable is Philadelphia Trust Company, the same private bank that refinanced Santorum's Virginia home in 2002, which gave $10,000. The CEO of Philadelphia Trust, Michael Crofton, is chairman of the charity's board of advisers. The foundation also raised $25,000 from the PMA Foundation, the charitable arm of a risk-management firm in suburban Philadelphia; $25,000 from the suburban Philadelphia development firm Preferred Real Estate; and $10,000 from J. Brian O'Neill, the brother of that firm's founder and himself a developer.

The charity also received $10,000 from the Keystone Sanitary Landfill, owned by Louis DeNaples, a controversial Scranton businessman who is fending off published allegations that he associates with organized-crime figures. [DeNaples is in fact a casino owner whose alleged ties to the Bufalino mob family in Pennsylvania have landed him in very hot water over the past few years.]

The donor list isn't the only overlap between Santorum's charity and his political operation. The charity's treasurer is Barbara Bonfiglio -- who works out of the Washington, D.C., lobbying firm of Williams and Jensen and serves as treasurer of the senator's leadership PAC, America's Foundation.

Operation Good Neighbor also paid $50,000 in total salary in 2002 and 2003 to Rob Bickhart, Santorum's finance director, who is also the charity's executive director. It has paid $118,710 in fundraising fees to Maria Diesel of Chester County, Pa., who also raises money for Santorum's political efforts.

Under Bickhart's direction, in other words, Santorum's tax-exempt nonprofit "charity" filled the wallets of his political operatives while shortchanging the poor. The story provoked immediate revulsion. The Washington Post ran a strong editorial complaining that outfits like Operation Good Neighbor were marred by "an inevitable element of extortion" and noting its shoddy self-dealing. Santorum stepped aside as the Senate leadership's ethics spokesman and lost his bid for reelection.

Four years later, everybody associated with that dingy episode is back in business, thanks to short memories and enduring gall.

Bickhart is collecting huge fees on top of a big salary at the RNC, where Chairman Steele has now asked him to investigate his own misconduct. Santorum raised well over a million dollars for his still-active PAC last year, which he is using to promote himself as a potential presidential nominee. Just the other day, he addressed a major religious right group in Iowa, where he was introduced by none other than Ralph Reed, the former Christian Coalition leader and Abramoff crony -- who is also trying to refurbish his career.

If Republicans worry about the party's lousy public image, they should ask themselves why figures like Bickhart, Reed and Santorum always prosper in their midst -- and why such political grifters are never punished or ostracized.

Today it is amazing to recall how significant this nothingness was once deemed to be, with nightly coverage on network newscasts. On Capitol Hill, Sen. Orrin Hatch demanded a fingerprint analysis to determine whether Hillary Clinton had touched the files (she hadn't) while lengthy investigations got under way in the Senate, the House and the Office of the Independent Counsel led by Kenneth Starr. Bob Dole, the Republican presidential candidate in 1996, compared "Filegate" with Nixon's Watergate scandal and asked: "Where's the outrage?"

Yesterday the last wheeze of hype was squeezed from that old controversy, when U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth dismissed the remaining civil lawsuit against former Clinton administration officials in the FBI files affair. Brought by eccentric attorney Larry Klayman, who became a favorite of cable television and conservative funders during the Clinton era, those costly lawsuits were described in the judge's decision as essentially baseless.

Summing up his findings, Lamberth wrote: "After years of litigation, endless depositions, the fictionalized portrayal of this lawsuit and its litigants on television, this court is left to conclude that with the lawsuit, to quote Gertrude Stein, 'there's no there there.'" A Reagan appointee once lauded by Klayman himself as "this great jurist," he showed a talent for understatement when he noted that "after ample opportunity," the plaintiffs "have not produced any evidence of the far-reaching conspiracy that sought to use intimate details from FBI files for political assassinations that they alleged. The only thing that they have demonstrated is that this unfortunate episode -- about which they do have cause to complain -- was exactly what the defendants claimed: a bureaucratic snafu."

The judge's decision specifically exonerated the remaining civil defendants, former White House officials Craig Livingstone and Bernard Nussbaum. Perhaps forgotten now, they -- along with Hillary Clinton, the supposed mastermind of "Filegate" -- were accused of felonies by top Republicans on Capitol Hill and maligned countless times by right-wing figures in the media and many mainstream journalists as well.

Of Livingstone, a low-level White House official who resigned immediately when he learned that FBI background summaries had been mishandled, the judge wrote: "There has been no evidence that Craig Livingstone sought to obtain the plaintiffs' FBI summary background reports for any improper purpose, political or otherwise." Concerning Nussbaum, an honorable attorney who also left the White House under a cloud, Lamberth noted, "There has been no evidence that Mr. Nussbaum made these requests himself and as the court has noted earlier, there has been no evidence presented that there was a conspiracy to request the plaintiffs' summary background reports for political purposes, let alone that Mr. Nussbaum was involved in it." In short, Nussbaum was wholly innocent even of responsibility for the "bureaucratic snafu."

In passing, the judge also mentioned his opinion of the House Government Operations Committee report on "Filegate," compiled when Congress was in the hands of Republicans who believed that their purpose in Washington was solely to obstruct the Clinton administration, mainly by concocting and conducting bogus investigations. (Their history of irresponsibility and frivolousness offer a preview of the Republican agenda should they win control next fall.) Lamberth wrote that the House report was inaccurate and not "sufficiently trustworthy" to be relied upon for factual information, and therefore "inadmissible" as evidence in the case.

Now that the moldy remnants of "Filegate" have at last been properly trashed, can anything relevant be learned from its distasteful history? Certain of the most assiduous promoters of the phony scandal are dead or retired from public life. But others are still around, exaggerating in the same old style when attacking the Obama White House, ACORN, and Democrats in Congress. So the pronouncements of all those responsible for pushing the bogus FBI file controversy are forever subject to the deepest doubt. Googling the term "Filegate" brings up stories that should embarrass the Wall Street Journal editorial page; the Media Research Center, whose chief wingnut Brent Bozell  continued to flog this discredited fake as late as November 2007;  National Review Online; WorldNetDaily; Fox News Channel, then in its  noisome infancy; and indeed, nearly every other organ-grinder and kazoo-blower of the Republican noise machine.

It took Judge Lamberth a long time to say so, but when these people (and their gullible friends in the mainstream media) cry scandal, it is safe to assume that there is no there there. 

The headline on the Newsmax poll story -- "Bill Clinton Bests Former Presidents to Handle Crisis Today" -- concerns the unsurprising discovery that the American public considers the last Democratic president best qualified of all his peers (by far) to cope with the issues that America confronts today. Comissioned by Newsmax, which is run by Christopher Ruddy and owned by him and Richard Mellon Scaife, among others, the poll queried 4,000 people who participate in Zogby's online surveys. 

Among respondents asked the following question -- "Of the current living former presidents, which do you think is best equipped to deal with the problems the country faces today?" -- 41 percent chose Bill Clinton, trailed by George W. Bush with 15 percent, George H.W. Bush with 7 percent, and Jimmy Carter with only 5 percent, while 26 percent chose "none," and 5 percent were "not sure." Those choices may be partly a function of the age of the former presidents, since the elder Bush and Carter are considerably older than the younger Bush and Clinton. But Clinton finished first among all age groups, all races, all religions, and both sexes, with a significantly better showing among women (46 percent) than men (36 percent). 

The most salient question -- given Barack Obama’s dipping numbers and the right-wing ripple of nostalgia for George Bush -- tested them against each other. By a margin of 48 to 38, respondents said they would elect Obama over Bush if they faced that choice. Twelve percent said "other" and 2 percent said "not sure." Newsmax didn’t publish the cross tabs but its story noted that, according to the poll, "Obama still nabs a large proportion of self-described independents, pulling 42 percent of these voters. Only 33 percent said they would opt for Bush."

While those aren't wonderful numbers for Obama, they aren't terrible either -- especially at a moment when the mainstream media depict him as weakened and imperiled.

When ranting on about Rangel, however, what the Republicans surely won't mention is that he's not alone in questionable fundraising for a vanity academic institution that bears his name. Leaders on both sides of Capitol Hill have done likewise for years -- notably including the  odious Trent Lott -- but the most troubling example is none other than Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who now holds Lott's former post. If the term "Senate Ethics Committee" weren't an oxymoron, he would be enduring an intense investigation, too.

McConnell is a graduate of the University of Louisville, a place of higher learning that he is seeking to transform into a display case for his limitless narcissism (as well as that of his wife, former Bush Labor Secretary Elaine Chao). Lots of nice things at the  university are named after him, but above all there is the McConnell Center for Political Leadership, a special program much like the Rangel Center at CCNY. In such places, young and idealistic scholars are introduced to the tradition of public service represented by these great men, etc.

According to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which has named both Rangel and McConnell to its annual lists of the "most corrupt" legislators, the list of donors to the McConnell Center was kept hidden by university administrators. When the Louisville Courier-Journal sued to obtain the names of those donors, the Kentucky Supreme Court handed down a curious decision. Future donors to the center would have to be revealed, the court ruled in August 2008, but 62 past donors could remain anonymous.

But thanks to the newspaper's diligent  reporting, names of several of the bigger donors have emerged over the past several years. They include Toyota, which gave $833,000 to the McConnell Center and  considers the Kentucky senator among its main Washington assets during its current crisis; RJ Reynolds and Phillip Morris, which gave $150,000 and $450,000, respectively, and which know they can count on him as a staunch backer of tobacco interests; and Yum Inc., the huge KFC/Pizza Hut/Taco Bell franchiser and a $250,000 donor, whose management was surely pleased when McConnell sponsored a special-interest bill protecting the fast-food industry against lawsuits alleging that their products cause obesity, heart disease and diabetes.

Yet  of all the dubious donors to the McConnell Center, the worst smell emanates from BAE Systems, the British-based defense firm that just settled a years-long, transatlantic bribery investigation last month by paying a record $450 million fine negotiated by prosecutors in London and Washington. BAE subsidiary United Defense Industries gave $500,000 to the McConnell Center because, as a spokesman proudly  explained to the Courier-Journal, "We have a very good relationship with Senator McConnell. We appreciate all he's done for our company and our employees in Louisville."

What has he done for BAE? In the fall of 2007, to cite just one notorious instance, he secured three earmarks worth $25 million for the firm in the defense appropriations bill for programs that the Pentagon had not requested. By then, everyone knew that BAE was crooked and under investigation by the Justice Department, but McConnell continued to perform favors for the company and accept donations from its political action committee.

"Most politicians decide that a scandal is a good time to stop doing business with a company, at least until the scandal is over," remarked CREW executive director Melanie Sloan at the time. "Particularly when we're talking about a criminal investigation over bribery. You would think that a member of Congress would want to steer clear of anyone accused of bribery."

Unless you're Mitch McConnell, that is, who can rely on his fellow senators to do nothing about his corrupt earmarking -- and on the mainstream media, whose deep thinkers will swoon over Rangel's wrongdoing while McConnell's trespasses are simply never mentioned. 

The Times originally investigated Rangel’s finances and fundraising and then published the stories that triggered the official ethics probe. The ethics committee, reorganized by Speaker Nancy Pelosi in 2007, ultimately did not shrink from admonishing one of the most powerful and senior Democrats in the House, and continues to examine other allegations against him. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington -- a watchdog group funded by Democratic donors -- twice named Rangel to its annual list of “most corrupt” members of Congress (which is always admirably bipartisan, unlike such lists maintained by CREW's conservative counterparts).

Yet as the Republicans and their media epigones celebrate Rangel’s downfall, the contrast with their own typical tolerance of corruption in their own ranks is instructive. To draw political comparisons between the cases of Rangel and Tom DeLay, as some mainstream pundits and conservative commentators do, is glib and fatuous if not simply dishonest. 

Keep in mind that none of the GOP pet media outlets, such as the Washington Times, the Weekly Standard or Fox News Channel, has ever initiated an ethics investigation of a Republican in the House leadership. Instead, these outfits habitually devote their efforts to protecting Republicans, no matter how crooked. Indeed, they tend to accuse the Times of “liberal bias” whenever the paper criticizes or investigates a Republican.

Five years ago, when DeLay came under intense pressure from prosecutors, the press and watchdog groups, the National Review urged conservatives to rally around him in an editorial, noting dismissively that “many of the offenses DeLay is being accused of—taking foreign trips funded by outside groups, attending events with lobbyists—are committed by every congressman on Capitol Hill.” Of course taking a foreign trip funded by an outside group (with corporate support) is precisely the transgression for which the ethics committee admonished Rangel.

But the same National Review editorial suggested that official rebukes by the ethics committee are unimportant anyway, at least when directed at a Republican leader: “The [ethics] committee did warn DeLay to be more careful, the ‘admonishment’ that has played in the media as an official sanction, which it wasn't.” In short, they didn’t believe an admonishment by the ethics committee was enough to get rid of DeLay, but it is reason enough to throw out Rangel -- and vote against the Democrats who pushed him out, just because they’re members of the same party.

During the decade or so when the Republicans controlled the House, their stewardship of the ethics committee – and their handling of ethical issues – was deplorably weak. In those days, they didn’t believe DeLay should be removed from leadership because of those wimpy admonishments. Indeed, they didn’t believe that he should have to step down  even if indicted for a felony! That was the permissive viewpoint of the great majority of the House Republican caucus in November 2004, when they voted (just after the presidential election) to change the rules so that DeLay’s expected indictment would not automatically oust him. They held that vote in strict caucus secrecy – and a few months later restored the old rule when public outrage became overwhelming.

Reluctant to punish DeLay for his multiple transgressions and abuses, the House Republican leadership instead eagerly rapped the handful of Republicans on the ethics committee who had admonished him. Here the contrast between the Democrats and the Republicans is striking. Speaker Pelosi may have wished her friend Rangel could somehow escape the consequences of his actions, but she did nothing to hinder or intimidate the ethics committee. 

The Republicans  purged their own members from the ethics committee -- and its chairman, Rep. Joel Hefley, R-Colo. -- for the sin of joining committee Democrats in unanimously admonishing DeLay. Replacing them were three more pliable members, who had publicly admitted voting to change the indictment rule. One of those three DeLay stooges was none other than Rep. Tom Cole, who now serves as deputy whip under Minority Leader John Boehner .

When did the Republicans start to worry so much about ethical purity? Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., who replaced Hefley as ethics chairman, was notable only for stalling probes into the truly repugnant misconduct of Mark Foley, R-Fla., Randy Duke Cunningham, R-Calif., and Bob Ney, R-Ohio, as well as his sponsor DeLay. Foley narrowly escaped criminal indictment, while the other two went to prison (where Cunningham will remain for the rest of his life).

The rule that Rangel violated when he took those now-infamous Caribbean trips was instituted by the Democratic majority as part of its ethics reorganization. This was a rules change that Boehner vocally opposed -- and it is a rule that Boehner would have violated more than once had it been in effect a year or two earlier. Back in July 2006, the New York Times reported on one of Boehner’s many subsidized vacations:

"Mr. Boehner flew to a golf resort in Boca Raton, Fla., in March for a convention of commodities traders, who have contributed more than $100,000 to his campaigns and are lobbying against a proposed federal tax on futures transactions. During the trip, Mr. Boehner assured his hosts that Congress would most likely not approve a tax they opposed. His leadership committee, the Freedom Project, which in recent months has enlisted the use of corporate planes from Federal Express, Aflac and the Florida Power and Light Company, later reimbursed the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for the cost of the Boca Raton trip."

Naturally Boehner’s leadership PAC is funded heavily by corporate interests – so he was “reimbursing” one corporation with money donated to him by others. Boehner has always been known as an obsequious servant of business lobbyists, dating back to the moment in 1995 when he was observed handing out checks from the Brown & Williamson tobacco company political action committee on the House floor. (Confronted by a few naive GOP freshmen, he conceded that such brazen grifting “didn’t look good” and was sorry that he had been caught.)

At this point it is clear that Rangel is guilty of hubris and sloppiness, and perhaps worse. It isn’t easy to understand why he should be branded irredeemably “corrupt,” however, while someone like Boehner is considered an honorable public servant. The notion that he and his cronies would restore ethical standards if they regain the majority must be a joke.

Nowhere did he or anyone around him complain back then that Emanuel could not make his will done in the White House, or worry that the president was not listening to him. That particular profile included a coy paragraph, which offered a tantalizing clue about things to come. Explaining that a Times magazine story about Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett had annoyed the president by exploring her difficult relationship with Emanuel, Baker and Zeleny suggested that Obama himself had informally forbidden everyone from "cooperating with staff profiles," which was why "Mr. Emanuel declined a formal interview for this article." 

To describe someone as declining a "formal interview" sounds like another way of saying that he spilled everything off the record or on background, of course. Which seems to be what Rahm is doing these days, either himself or through cutouts.  

First Dana Milbank and then Jason Horowitz set forth the argument for Emanuel's blamelessness in the Washington Post, somehow shifting responsibility from the chief of staff to other aides and even the president -- and portraying him as the sole strategic thinker in an administration bent on liberal self-immolation.

As Noam Scheiber argues in this subtler New Republic assessment, Emanuel may not be directly participating in these Washington Post pieces, which defend him while diminishing the president and other senior staff. But Scheiber offers a telltale clue. "True to form," he writes, "Emanuel refused to speak to me on the record." The key phrase is "on the record." Presumably the inside information in all of these Rahm-reinforcing articles comes from the chief of staff’s loyal surrogates, who wouldn’t feel free to talk unless he wanted them to do so. 

Now that political pressures are mounting and the president’s popularity is slipping, Emanuel is no longer advertising himself as the testosterone-fueled alpha dog in charge of everything. Now he is a lonely voice of reason, whose wise counsel is ignored, imperiling all the hopes that we all held dear, etc., etc. 

Both versions cannot be accurate. What is probably the dismal truth about his stewardship of the Obama vessel can be found toward the end of last August’s Times story, which showed the chief of staff steering without any rudder of principle, and playing captain in policy and political waters too deep for him. He is largely responsible for the fiasco of financial reform, the soured deal with the pharmaceutical and insurance interests on health reform, and the botched retreat from the president’s promise to close Gitmo. 

Whether and how to change the White House staff is a problem that Obama will have to face eventually. Even sooner, however, the president must decide whether to accept Emanuel’s insistence that he had nothing to do with the Post articles, which have inflicted real damage by depicting Obama as a weak and hapless foil to his brilliant deputy. If he cannot disprove that portrait, his presidency will continue to drift.