Why is it that Republican officials and candidates seem to be having so much trouble actually following the rule of law lately?

On the heels of the Republicans’ Congressional committee accounting scandal, we’re learning now that John McCain may be brazenly trying to skirt around the campaign finance law that has his name on it (McCain-Feingold) by pretending he never pledged to sign on to public financing, even though he obviously did according to his own bank’s loan docs.

Dem chairman Howard Dean is calling him out on it and putting his feet to the fire to follow his own law.

On top of that, we’re seeing locally that IL-14 GOP candidate Jim “Milk Dud” Oberweis could also be playing fast and loose with the finance laws by giving his campaign his own money in an end-around which may violate that same McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. Of course, Oberweis has a history of FEC violations having been fined a rather small (for a millionaire) sum of $21,000 in 2004 related to the Oberweis Dairy ads which ran simultaneous to one of his failed Senate runs.

Plus, in what appears to be a separate violation of election law, several Chicago-area TV stations have had to pull Oberweis’ ads in recent days because they directly violated disclosure rules.

Of course, there’s also the appalling and ongoing Oberweis problem with blatant lies which, while unethical, is “legal”. In 2004 he lied about the number of illegal immigrants in that infamously (and inadvertently) hilarious helicopter commercial. Then, during his 2006 run for governor, he cooked up false newspaper headlines in his failed attacks against Judy Baar Topinka. Staying true to dishonest form, just this month he decided to lie about mythical troop “withdrawals” from Iraq in one of his TV ads, among other falsehoods over the years.