I don’t know when William Salatan jumped the ethics shark at Slate; I used to find him fair, reasonable and perceptive. Now he has apparently gone over the Dark Side, the shadowy, ethics-free realm where the Clintons are victims of a vast right wing conspiracy. Too bad.

There is some compensation for Salatan, though. He just penned the perfect example of the Shameless Left’s attempt to exploit the fall of  former GOP Speaker Dennis Hastert to exonerate Bill Clinton, and by extension, his Lady MacBeth, Hillary, as she tries to complete her rise to power fueled by the public’s acceptance of her husband’s corrupt ways.

You can read it here, and I would hope that most of you would be able to spot, and quickly, the multiple blatant ethics bait-and-switches that Salatan employs. But for those deceived, let me provide some guidance.

Many commentators have made the point that Hastert’s prosecution looks politically motivated and unfair. He is not being prosecuted for the alleged sexual misconduct with a student believed to be the source of an extortion attempt, and paying a blackmailer is no crime. He is being prosecuted for lying to the F.B.I about the reason for his large cash withdrawals. Says Salatan:

“The critics have a point. Lying under oath and evading transaction surveillance are derivative crimes. Usually, they’re prosecuted only if the underlying offense is serious and demonstrably true. You can argue that if the core allegation hasn’t been proved, or if the core issue isn’t grave enough, it’s cheap and abusive to proceed with prosecution based purely on derivative charges. But Hastert can’t make that argument, because he made the opposite argument 17 years ago. He threw the book at President Clinton for lying about sex.”

Thus Slate’s misleading and ignorance-seeding headline, “Hastert’s Hypocrisy.” There is no hypocrisy. Moreover, like Professor Kerr, Salatan mistakenly says that Clinton was impeached for “lying about sex.”  That was a Lanny Davis/Clinton spin talking point, and it is false..

Salatan is clever: he doesn’t exactly say that Hastert was wrong to seek impeachment for Clinton, just that Hastert can’t argue that his prosecution is excessive because “there’s no statute of limitations on principle.” Salatan sets up that deceitful statement—there are completely different principles involved—after quoting experts and pundits to the effect that Hastert shouldn’t be prosecuted. (He should, by the way.) If it’s unfair to prosecute Hastert, then it must have been wrong to impeach Clinton, right?

No, Salatan.  You are wrong, and suspiciously wrong, because I know you were once smarter than this. Hastert properly sought impeachment…not criminal charges…against a President of the United States for committing perjury and obstructing justice, as well as for using government employees to further his cover-up, while he was President, because Presidents are and must be held to the highest standard of conduct while in office.

• Hastert isn’t a President now. Fallacy #1.

• Hastert’s obstruction of justice didn’t relate to a matter committed while he was President of the United States, since he never was, or even Speaker of the House. Fallacy #2.

• Hastert is being prosecuted by law enforcement, facing criminal penalties. Clinton wasn’t and nobody, including Speaker Hastert, ever argued he should be. Fallacy #3.

• If Hastert had been found to have engaged in exactly the same misconduct as Clinton while Hastert was Speaker—lying under oath in a court of law, lying to the public, engineering a cover-up, misleading a grand jury—he would have been dumped as Speaker  (or resigned) immediately…because he was Speaker of the House, a high position in the U.S. government requiring exemplary honesty and compliance with the law. Fallacy #4.

So what we have from William Salatan is this Dark Side (and Dull Side) reasoning:

What Bill Cimton did as President of the United States is indistinguishable in gravity from what private citizen Dennis Hastert did long after leaving the government. Criminal prosecution is indistinguishable from the Constitutional effort to remove a President who has disgraced his office and violated his oath. It would be hypocritical for Hastert to argue that he is being unfairly prosecuted for a crime by law enforcement, because almost two decades ago he didn’t seek to have Bill Clinton prosecuted by law enforcement, but sought to have him removed for conduct that also would have resulted in his own removal as Speaker. As a result, though Salatan feels that Clinton shouldn’t have been impeached for his conduct as President because he was President, that same principle he thinks is unjust (but isn’t) should be applied to Hastert now, a non-President, non-public official, to punish him for holding Clinton accountable.

We have a winner.