Politics In Acton

So the downfall of Duke Cunningham has prompted a strange debate. No, it's not the old mystery about whatever became of Chuck Cunningham; it's the question of whether the party in power is always more corrupt than the other party. As I'm not entirely convinced America has more than one party in the first place, I have no strong feelings on this question, but it does seem to me that the current rash of Republican scandals is primarily a function of the party's control of most of official Washington. By saying that, however, I am apparently spouting the party line of Reason's GOP paymasters, since the fact that Republicans are more corrupt than the Democrats is as obvious as the medical benefits of circumcision, the superiority of the auteur theory of cinema, and the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.

Which is odd because when I covered the same point in an interview about the Tom DeLay indictment with John J. Pitney, I got a rash of hate mail from people denouncing me as an obvious Democratic shill because I hadn't noted that the prosecutor in the DeLay case is a known Democrat who arranged to have 100,000 cattle futures flown into the Mena Airfield in exchange for four buddhist temples, free use of the House Post Office, and backend participation in James Traficant's toupee.

So which is it? Is there any measurable corruption meter in which one or the other party always comes out ahead?