Ruth Marcus lays the wood to Nancy Pelosi this morning, calling Murtha "unfit" to be Majority Leader. Suprisingly, Joe Conason isn't happy either:

By siding openly with her friend and ally, Mr. Murtha, in a letter to her colleagues, however, Ms. Pelosi has also ensured that the outcome will render an instant judgment on her authority in her new role. She has sent a clear signal that what she values most is loyalty--and that she is willing to risk embarrassment to enforce discipline. For Democrats who have too often failed to act with any semblance of cohesion or coherence, the Pelosi approach is refreshingly tough and free of timidity.

But as a national leader who vowed to clean up Washington's dirty politics during the 2006 campaign, she may yet come to regret her endorsement of Mr. Murtha. After promising to "drain the swamp," she immediately adopted one of the swamp's hungriest alligators as her pet.

What irony. One of the left's main knocks on President Bush over the years is that he's been too blinded by loyalty and that his administration has suffered from cronyism. Yet here you have the new Speaker of the House, whose drapes haven't even been measured or hung yet, pulling out all the stops to install an ethically-challenged pal for Majority Leader out of blind loyalty and passing over another perfectly competent member (Jane Harman) out of pure pique to turn over the Chairmanship of the Intelligence Committee to a man who was impeached for taking bribes. Not the most auspicious of beginnings, I'd say.