Michelle Malkin, of whom it can be said that her conservative bona fides are absolutely beyond doubt, provides some necessary scrutiny of Rick Perry’s record. (OH, NO, MR. BILL! Scrutiny of a conservative! Only a RINO would do that! A RINO Rockefeller establishment Bilderberger moderate! Fight back! Send Malkin out of town on a rail!) It follows last week’s important piece in the Wall Street Journal about Perry’s crony capitalism. In the days since the WSJ piece appeared, I have been appalled that a lot of conservative ideologues miss the whole point. The point isn’t that Perry set up a pubic-private partnership, in semi-contradiction of ideological purity. The ideology of the state fund isn’t at issue. What is at issue is the ethics of how Perry and his appointees ran the fund. The problem is that so much of the money was doled out to major campaign contributors of Perry or to those with other close connections to Perry or to the fund’s board — sometimes even when the recipients offered, apparently, very little reason to believe that their businesses would actually succeed. In the ethical sense if not the legal sense — and, believe me, the legality will indeed be re-examined as well, and it will be a campaign issue if Perry gets the nomination — it all certainly looks corrupt.

But Perry’s a conservative, so maybe I shouldn’t say that. Or maybe I shouldn’t complain about Perry actively providing Texas tax money to the children of illegal immigrants. Nor about anything else.

Maybe we’ll just let Malkin do the dirty work. Because she has guts. And integrity.