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There's a lot more to this. I just got home from the gym where I had to listen to someone's tirade (not to me, thankfully) about how corrupt Weldon is. Weldon was *safe* until the scandal broke, and *it's his fault*.

We have an ethics problem in our party. It's not enough to say, "there is no evidence", "he didn't break the law", or any other defensive explanation. We shouldn't have to be issuing them in the first place. People in our party need to get this burned into their brains for all time: the media is 100% in the tank for the Democrats and they will crucify us for the slightest appearance of impropriety. It doesn't matter if our people actually do anything wrong or not. If it looks bad, it is bad. They absolutely will report it that way and they will hammer it all the way up to election day.

It's not enough to say that "we'll clean the party up", or try the outsider approach, "the party needs to clean itself up" as if the Republican Party is some anthropomorphic being that has its own intelligence. The party is us and people in a lot of districts (like mine) have said loud and clear that our behavior is lacking in their eyes. Remember, with the Liberal Media stacking the deck, perception is reality, and they get to shape perception.

I'm sure that a lot of us work for companies where we have to undergo ethics training. I've worked for three such companies in my travels, and you wouldn't believe the ethics training I have to undergo where I currently work. I don't shy from it, in fact while I undergo more hours of it now, I've worked at other places where it was even more strict in terms of what to do and not to do. For our party, the #1 ethics rule must be:

It is not enough to not have a conflict of interest—there must not even be the appearance of a conflict of interest.

The GOP should (and must, in this political climate) undergo yearly ethics training, maybe even every six months (hey, if I have to do it, so can they). They must be public about not only taking the training, the training itself must be public for all to see. The party's charter should not allow assistance of candidates who are delinquent in their training. No slaps on the wrist anymore. The GOP must prove that they're serious.

I know what some are thinking—that it would be an admission of guilt. I would ask those people: what in the heck do you see going on tonight? The voters have already passed judgment in their votes, and they already think you're guilty of impropriety, whether you are or not! We're always talking about needing a new Contract With America, and this should be the first covenant made.