Steele Equivocating

The Washington Post ran an editorial on Sept. 23rd that condemned the actions of staffers of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, who illegally obtained confidential credit reports on Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele. OK, condemned may be a bit strong for what the Post editorialized, but they did say quite firmly that, if they did it again, The DSCC should be prepared to go on time out. I am quite willing to say that I don't know enough about what happened to know if this story has legs enough to make it down the driveway, let alone around the block, but I did find a couple of things quite interesting about this editorial.
First, nearly as much time is spent discussing how Republicans do this sort of thing, too. I can't help but wonder, if the situation were reversed, would the piece have gone on about how both sides pull dirty tricks on the other? Or would the commentary have focused more on the specific dirty trick involved. The Post does its readers a disservice if when one side of the aisle is caught with its hand in the cookie jar, everyone is at fault, while when the other side is caught doing something untoward, the focus is on them alone.
Then, the Post closed with what I think is an absolutely preposterous comparison.

As political dirty tricks go, snooping for financial dirt on Mr. Steele by illegal means strikes us as roughly on a par with eavesdropping on a rival party's private telephone conversations, as Virginia Republican officials did several years ago.

Excuse me, but this doesn't seem like it is even roughly on par with eavesdropping. The correct comparison is that it would be equivalent to illegally tapping a rival party's telephone. I don't know if this is what Virginia Republicans did or not, but that would be roughly the same. The Mainstream Media likes to pretend that they are even-handed, but editorials such as this make that difficult to believe.