They actually sent that out as the header of an email, in response to Rep. Flake’s latest attempt to get some sort of accountability in place over earmarks and internal corruption:

As the House prepared to vote this week on Republican Rep. Jeff Flake’s push for an ethics investigation involving Rep. John Murtha and other senior appropriators, Democratic leaders sent an unmistakable message to their members:

“Don’t be a Flake.”

That was the subject line of an e-mail that staffers for first- and second-term Democrats received Tuesday from Rep. Chris Van Hollen, assistant to Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The message said that Democrats would once again be “voting to table another Flake resolution” — and it made clear that leadership would have its eyes on any Democrats even thinking about defecting.

This is all political, of course – well, it’s all political on the Democratic side. The long-term Democratic Congressmen (most of whom have never really recovered from the psychological trauma of losing the House in 1994) have precisely zero interest in turning off the spigots, now that their mouths are underneath them again; and the new crop of Democratic Congressmen are well aware that it’s going to take at least ten years for them to turn into long-term Democratic Congressmen, and they don’t really have ten years. And that the long-term Congressmen don’t really care if a few Blue-in-Red districts flip back next year. And that the only thing keeping Democrats together in Congress is…

Well, I’m sure that there’s something. In the meantime, marvel at a situation where wanting accountability makes you a partisan ‘flake.’ A definition that I am absolutely certain bemused such long-term members of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy as Democracy 21, Common Cause, Public Citizen and U.S. PIRG*.

Moe Lane

*H/T Instapundit.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.