“Let me begin by citing a few of your statements with which I am in accord (and with which most liberals and progressives also agree)….I also agree it “would be wrong for conservatives to adopt a knee-jerk negative response to tax proposals or spending initiatives.” -Liberal Washington Post Columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. (5/21/08)

Former Oklahoma Congressman Mickey Edwards, who was run out of town for his involvement in the house banking scandal, is busy today doing what he does best: back-stabbing the Republicans in a liberal setting.

Taking a cue from the Scott McClellan-Benedict Arnold wing of the party, the former Congressman was in the ‘conservative’ Washington Post back in March, slipping the knife into long-time colleague Dick Cheney.

“For at least six years, as I’ve become increasingly frustrated by the Bush administration’s repeated betrayal of constitutional — and conservative — principles, I have defended Vice President Cheney, a man I’ve known for decades and with whom I served and made common cause in Congress. No longer.“

For those too young to remember, Edwards is the former Oklahoma 6th-District Congressman who was a principal ‘perp’ in the house banking scandal of 1992. Edwards was one of 22 representatives condemned by the House Ethics Committee after it was revealed he had bounced 386 checks at the House of Representatives bank in 13 months, further illustrating Edward’s elitist reputation for playing by different rules than normal folks.

While many folks like his buddy Vin Weber simply slunk off into the sunset, Edwards had the temerity to try re-election in the 1992 Republican primary, and Oklahoma Republicans fired him as he finished last in a three-way primary that eventually saw Ernest Istook elected to replace the congressman.

Since his firing by the electorate, the humiliated Edwards has held a string of academic positions that allow him to criticize Republicans and dissemble on an unsuspecting public. Just this week, Edwards fabricated an easily-disproved tale when he attempted to fool our readers into believing that uber-liberal billionaire George Soros was not involved with the liberal think tank Aspen Institute. Ironically, Edwards attempted to use Weber, and former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed, as evidence that the Aspen Institute is “studiously, and carefully, non-partisan and non-ideological.”

From a 2006 Time Magazine article titled: “The Rise and Fall of Ralph Reed”

“For a high-profile religious conservative like Reed, the stories of being paid millions by one Indian tribe to run a religious-based antigambling campaign to prevent another tribe from opening a rival casino made him look like something worse than a criminal–a hypocrite. He had once called gambling a “cancer” on the body politic. And the e-mails to Abramoff didn’t help, especially those that seemed to suggest that the man who had deplored in print Washington’s system of “honest graft” was eager to be part of it. “I need to start humping in corporate accounts!” he wrote Abramoff a few days after the 1998 election.”

So today the bitter and arrogant Edwards is in the Washington Post: Obviously a much better opportunity to fool people than in OKPNS.