Barbara Boxer is the Chairman of the Senate Ethics Committee. Yes, that Senate Ethics Committee that cleared Chris “Sweetheart Mortgage” Dodd of wrongdoing not so long ago.

She’s also a close friend and political ally of ethically-challenged Congresswoman Maxine Waters, as RedState has previously noted. Yes: Boxer and Waters can “look at each other and roll our eyes” when stuff liberals like them don’t like happens in Congress, like, for example, their colleagues voting for troop funding or against using taxpayer money to fund abortions.

So maybe it should be no surprise that when asked about the ethics charges facing her good friend Maxine and whether they could hurt her re-election campaign, Senate Ethics Committee Chairman Barbara Boxer should say things like this:

“No, because Republicans have so many ethics charges pending against their people.”

Get that? The Chairman of the Senate Ethics Committee, who is buddy-buddy with Maxine Waters and has aided and abetted a much-criticized political favor-selling racket that involves Waters’ family making money off of their mother’s position as a U.S. Representative, and who thinks Chris Dodd’s behavior is just swell, thinks voters don’t care about ethics.

The Chairman of the Senate Ethics Committee should know better.

The dirty little secret of the 2006 election– you know, the one where Republicans took a thumpin’– is that more voters cited corruption and ethics as a factor in determining their vote than any other issue, including the Iraq War.

And Boxer’s dirty little secret is that no matter how much she may want to shove off concerns about ethics on Republicans, separate to her ties to Waters and her Committee’s maneuver to give Dodd a pass for his ethical lapses, she has her own ethical problems that she won’t be able to run away from.

For example, Boxer recently attended a “rally for job creation” event in Los Angeles with union bosses, including Richard Trumka. As The Hill noted, Trumka’s prepared (and delivered) remarks focused heavily on trashing Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, both of whom happen to be Republican candidates for statewide office in the state, and the latter of whom just so happens to be Boxer’s opponent, making this an overtly political event, and one where the rhetoric was obviously designed to benefit her candidacy.

Boxer also just so happens to have promoted this political event via a press release issued by her official Senate office (copy of said release pasted below), which itself also appears to have been involved in the organization of it.

So, one can only conclude that Barbara Boxer thinks the Senate ethics manual’s prohibitions on using taxpayer resources for political purposes– such as those contained on pages 151 and 153 thereof– do not apply to her. Just like Maxine Waters thinks she’s done nothing wrong. And just like Boxer doesn’t think her friendship and political relationship with Waters, which has included paying $25,000 to a Waters family political operation that has been blasted by none other than Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), matters.

As usual, Barbara Boxer is wrong.