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Remember how Nancy Pelosi exploited the female card before the midterm elections? "Maybe it will take a woman to clean up the House and a new speaker to restore civility," she bragged.

Women, she implied, do a better job than men because we presumably know how to get down on our hands and knees and scrub the mold and mildew out of every corner and crevice of our own domiciles.

But from the way she's acting, Nancy Pelosi doesn't know spic from span. She's conducting Beltway business as usual, just like the good old boys she demonized throughout the campaign. (Madame Pelosi just happens to do it in an Armani aqua blue-gray pantsuit that gets thumbs-up from obsequious Washington fashion writers.)

Well, a back-scratching corruptocrat in pastel is still a back-scratching corruptocrat. Case in point: Which congressman is Mrs. Clean considering as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence? Impeached federal judge Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., who took bribes, lied under oath and was kicked off the bench.

And which colleague is she backing for House majority leader? One of Congress's leading dirtbags: Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa.

As if his extremist cut-and-run war strategery weren't bad enough, Murtha's (un)ethical record is enough to make even liberal apologists blush.

Unfortunately, Murtha's defeated opponent, Diana Irey, couldn't get folks to pay enough attention to his Abscam past during the campaign. But now that he is poised to assume the speakership and all its attendant perks and privileges, the Abscam scandal is front and center.

In 1980, Murtha was an unindicted co-conspirator in a massive bribery probe -- in which undercover FBI agents videotaped Murtha entertaining a $50,000 bribe from agents posing as emissaries for Arab sheiks trying to enter our country illegally. Democrat defenders of Murtha scoff that the story is "old news." (Liberal math: Abscam story from 1980 equals "old news." Bush National Guard story from 1973 equals "new news.")

But only recently have we been reminded of Abscam transcripts that paint an even uglier picture of Murtha than the short snippet of publicly available FBI video in which Murtha turned down the bribe. As noted by The American Spectator, an old Jack Anderson column reported these little-noticed parts of Murtha's conversation with the undercover agents:

"I want to deal with you guys awhile before I make any transactions at all, period. . . . After we've done some business, well, then I might change my mind. . . . "

"All at once," he said, "some dumb [expletive deleted] would go start talking eight years from now about this whole thing and say [expletive deleted], this happened. Then in order to get immunity so he doesn't go to jail, he starts talking and fingering people. So the [S.O.B.] falls apart." . . .

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