DEMOCRAT Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) in a not-so-surprising, unethical-as-all-hell moment, appointed his mistress to be a US Attorney in Montana. While they were dating.

Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus’ office confirmed late Friday night that the Montana Democrat was carrying on an affair with his state office director, Melodee Hanes, when he nominated her to be U.S. attorney in Montana. [...] Hanes, who is divorced and now lives with Baucus in the Eastern Market neighborhood of Washington, D.C., ultimately withdrew her name from consideration for the U.S. attorney position in order to move to Washington, and she now works in the Justice Department’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention as a counselor to the administrator.

Now, I’m sure some of you Liberal readers are confused, wondering, “What’s wrong with that?”

If Max has so little qualms about doing something as blatantly unethical and just plain WRONG as this, then where does he draw the line? How many other times has Max done something equally (if not more) disturbing, but no one called him out on it or caught him?

Men like Max Baucus personify everything that is wrong with the current crop of men and women holding court in Congress — on both sides of the aisles. We have way too many honest and decent people in this country who are capable of leading and serving in the Senate to have even one corrupt and immoral man like Max Baucus living off our dime.

But you know who looks worse than Max Baucus in this scandal? His whore…errr…mistress….or girlfriend, or whatever you want to call the chick he’s banging (Melodee Hanes) in exchange for high-profile government jobs.

Jules Crittenden:

She withdrew to move in with him in DC and take a DOJ job, which Baucus’ people say he had nothing to do with. She had extensive qualifications … and a resume with his name all over it.

I wonder how many other dirty old fat men Ms. Hanes has slept with to get all of that “extensive qualifications” on her resume? What? It’s a fair question…

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OTHERS:

Ace has my favorite Baucus/Hanes headline:

Max Baucus: Hey, You Know Who’d Make an Outstanding US Attorney? My Special Friend. She Knows All About Oral Arguments, Legal Briefs, and Penal Colonies, If You Know What I Mean.

I’m Banging the Stuffings Out of Her, Is What I Mean.

Uber-unhinged Liberal Blogger Matt Yglesias has a good point though about the greater picture of having the Senate appoint the very attorney’s who are supposed to investigate them:

A larger point here is that the tradition of senatorial control over US Attorney appointments is fairly problematic. Appointing your mistress is generally frowned upon, but appointing your political allies is par for the course. And yet, the US Attorney’s office is supposed to oversee public integrity investigations. One thing the Blago investigation has certainly made me think of is how bad would other politicians’ fundraising activities sound if they were being bugged by the FBI? Which isn’t to say we should go around bugging politicians’ phones at random, but it is smart to see these corruption issues thoroughly investigated. And that’s undermined by so closely linking the key prosecutors to local political bigwigs.