While Rep. Campfield, Bob Krumm and others draft their post mortems on failed ethics reforms in the Tennessee Legislature, there appears to be a growing need to examine some of our own ethics abuses out here in cyberland.

First we learned from TeamGOP that Jay Bush of Blogging for Bryant had left some anonymous comments praising the candidate following Ed Bryant’s being endorsed by 30 elected officials in Shelby County. B4B’s writer apologized, both in comments left on TeamGOP and in a post to his own blog admitting the mistake, while pro-Hilleary blogs Van Wagon and Van Fans gleefully jumped on the news — it seems they thought it would be a perfect one-two combination punch to the Bryant camp: a prominent Bryant supporter is discredited just as (what they expected would be) poor 4th quarter fundraising totals were about to be released by Bryant’s campaign.

As it turned out, though, Hilleary’s supporters in the blogosphere were wrong on the latter point. Ed Bryant announced his fundraising total at the Primary Debate on Tuesday night, and simultaneously in a press release delivered via e-mail just as the debate began — Bryant had outraised Hilleary for the quarter and had maintained his lead in money which could be used in the primary (though both trailed Bob Corker, who spent his evening preparing for an out-of-state fundraiser rather than addressing West Tennessee voters).

The Hilleary camp could have taken its lumps, admitting that Ed had surprised them by outraising Van while reemphasizing his solid showing in recent polls and strong name ID. Instead, as Bill Hobbs pointed out, they too broke blogger ethics by deleting a post (as well as visitor comments attached to it) which had been critical of Bryant’s fundraising. Instead of apologizing, pro-Van blogger Charles Badger compounded the error by arguing the post had “served it’s [sic] purpose and was no longer useful.” In addition, Badger continued to be dismissive of Bryant’s 4Q total, calling his fundraising lead “at best dismal.” Hobbs also revealed the identity of Badger’s anonymous* coblogger “jo,” a Hilleary supporter with close ties to the campaign whose bio and photo are featured on Hilleary’s campaign website.

I’ve had my say about Conservatives for Corker, and it looks like we can spare Jeff Moder’s supporters for now… but things tend to come in threes, and this time is no exception.

We turn back now to TeamGOP, and what appears to be some funny business surrounding a recent event in Tipton County. In two posts, District 8 candidate John Farmer asks questions about TeamGOP’s promotion of the event, which was billed as the Tipton County Republican Lincoln Day but appears not to have been sanctioned by the Tipton County Republican Party. Farmer is also wondering if someone at TeamGOP passed his e-mail address to the Hilleary campaign. As far as I’m aware, TeamGOP has not yet responded. I will withhold judgment until I hear both sides of the story, but I must say it doesn’t look good.

It seems to me that we in the blogosphere have some soul searching to do as we advocate ethics reforms at the state and federal level. We’ve got to clean up our own backyards before we can expect the officials we support to do the same. We’re not going to be effective voices for change if we are involved in ethics violations such as writing under false pretenses, deleting records, false advertising or mishandling private information.

Electing Ophelia Ford is not the best way to go about fixing the problems exposed by Tennessee Waltz, supporting big-money candidates funded in large part by outside special interest groups and lobbyists is not the best way to go about cleaning up after the Jack Abramoff scandal in D.C., and all these blogospheric hijinks are not the best way to support the Terry Rolands and Tom Coburns we so desperately need to clean up government.

I don’t expect I’ll make too many friends with this post, but the point is that I’m bothered and disappointed by the behavior of my fellow conservative bloggers; we can do better than this.

UPDATE: * - Justin Owen, aka “JO,” of Van Wagon has written to inform me that his identity was never anonymous, as I stated above, but had been disclosed in a series of posts. I regret the error. JO also asks how it could be considered improper for someone with close ties to the campaign to also contribute to a blog; on that note, I can only say the situation had the appearance of impropriety only in how I understood it at the time (anonymous on the blog, but known on the campaign website), so again on that note I regret the mistake and apologize for my misinterpretation.