I find it highly ironic just how often the party and ideology which, among its major tenets, supports "law and order" and a strict upholding of the law happens to forget about "law and order" when an illegal act gives them something they want to hear. Two recent examples - the Acorn videos and the so-called "climategate" emails - are the most recent examples of this phenomenon. There's a second level of irony in both of these examples - the use of selective editing and disclosure in order to leave false impressions, when many of these people have complained about selective editing of their own comments in the past - but I'm not dealing with that in this diary.
I was hardly alone in thinking this when the Acorn tapes came out. It was pointed out that recording without consent in Maryland is against the law, and one of the Acorn offices shown on video is the Baltimore office. This seems to have been forgotten in the GOP and conservative Rush to judgement. The tapes told them what they wanted to hear - regardless of the actual law. I don't know enough about other states' "consent laws" to pass judgement on the other videos.
A more recent example is how flippantly many conservative climate deniers have treated the "how" of how the "climate-gate" emails were obtained. I did see Michelle Malkin and a few others say "tsk tsk, you shouldn't have done that", but then they turned around and proceeded to use the illegally obtained emails as ammo. I (with help from another Kossack) remember the outcry over Palin's email account getting hacked, yet now Inhofe and others who supported her are perfectly willing to ignore how they got access to the content of the emails.
In both of these cases, my instinct is that the evidence would be thrown out if this was a court of law. However, these very same GOP-ers and their supporters are perfectly willing to use the "evidence", however flimsy, in the court of public opinion, even in the "hallowed halls" of Congress. I can't say I'm surprised at the hypocrisy, but it certainly is ironic.
I'd held off for a bit on publishing this diary because I didn't have any other examples that immediately came to mind, but I figured that people would just fill them in in comments as they come in (or not come in).