Shifting the Blame to the Bureaucracy

On Sunday, new House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., declared that even before any of the many investigations he plans to launch have started, he has concluded that the Obama administration is "one of the most corrupt administrations" in history.

But yesterday, Issa's spokesman, in an interview with the Washington Post, shifted the blame toward a different target -- the "institutionalized culture of waste, fraud and abuse" in the federal bureaucracy. "The enemy isn't the Democrats or the Republicans," said the spokesman, Kurt Bardella. "It's the bureaucracy that outlasts any one administration or political party."

Contrast that with the approach Rep. Peter T. King, R-N.Y., the incoming chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, is taking to his oversight efforts. "Different from Darrell Issa, I'm not expecting to find significant corruption in the departments," King told the Post. "To the extent there's disagreement, it will be philosophical disagreement and a question of leadership, whether or not the department is assertive enough."