The Rev. Jesse Jackson's been in the news lately for some unsavory business regarding a mistress, a baby and a pile of money. I can't honestly say I'm surprised. Unsavory business has been par for the course for Jackson's career, ever since his college days at my alma mater, the University of Illinois.

We'll get to that history in a minute. But first, in case you missed the latest news, here's a quick recap.

In January — just as Jackson had declared a "week of moral outrage" to protest the inauguration of George W. Bush — word got out that the married reverend had a 20-month-old daughter by a former aide. Moreover, he gave her sizable amounts of money which raised questions over how much had come from Jackson and how much from the organization he heads, the Rainbow/PUSH coalition — the latter funded largely through donations and taxpayer grants. (Financial irregularities are nothing new with Jackson's groups; federal audits have found millions of dollars unaccounted for.)

Under fire, Jackson quickly announced that he would withdraw from public life for a time of "healing" with his family. But three days later, the healing was apparently complete: Jesse announced his return to the limelight, and with characteristic immodesty declared himself engaged in "rebuilding a massive coalition of conscience" to advance various causes, like preserving abortion rights and abolishing the death penalty.

Like I said, I'm not really surprised. I've watched Jackson's career for a while now. It's worth a look not only for what it reveals about the man himself, but also about the political left of which he's been a fixture for decades.

Jackson attended the University of Illinois on a football scholarship for one year (1959-60), and for years thereafter told the story of how he left school because racism prevented him from playing quarterback. The story had a problem on its face, though; the starting quarterback for most of that year, Mel Meyers, was black. In 1987 — when Jackson was waging a presidential campaign — the local newspaper (the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette) started digging. It found evidence that Jackson, who was already on academic probation, had plagiarized a term paper; it even found the woman who said she typed the paper from a slightly marked-up article in Time magazine. It was in the midst of these accusations that Jackson withdrew from school.

Jackson has spent decades telling stories about his past that play well as racial politics, but don’t jibe with the facts. To black audiences he’s often boasted that when he was a waiter, he spat in the meals of white customers; when asked about it by a reporter in 1987, he claimed he’d made that up. ("For once," commented Weekly Standard writer Tucker Carlson in a later article, "it was hard to know which version of the story to believe.") He’s claimed to have grown up poor as the son of a maid and a janitor, when in fact his family was relatively middle class: his mother, notes Carlson, was a beautician and his father a postal worker. He’s claimed to be a "country preacher" when in fact he came from urban Greenville, S.C., and (report biographers Thomas Landess and Richard Quinn in their 1985 book Jesse Jackson and the Politics of Race) "had never lived in the country in his life."

But these tall tales pale by comparison with The Big Lie that launched Jackson into public prominence — a lie that exploited the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

When King was shot on a motel balcony in 1968, Jackson — then one of the staffers at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference — was standing in the courtyard below. In a chilling account, Landess and Quinn describe how Jackson immediately fabricated a tale to make himself heir apparent to the fallen martyr.

Within half an hour of the shooting, he was issuing orders to other witnesses not to talk to reporters, then racing to grab the media spotlight himself. "I came out [of a hotel room] to hear what was being said [to reporters]," said SCLC aide Hosea Williams, "then I heard Jesse say, ‘Yes, I was the last man in the world King spoke to.’ I knew Jesse was lying … and I had a feeling about what Jesse was trying to pull."

By the next day Jackson was appearing in front of network cameras with bloodstains on his shirt, claiming he got them while cradling the dying martyr in his arms. In fact, Jackson never touched King, as numerous witnesses cited by Landess and Quinn — including King aides — report, and as a news photo taken moments after the shooting confirms. Nevertheless, Time and other media outlets took Jackson at his word, and a myth was born.

Yet Jesse Jackson has gotten away with it. For decades he’s been identified as the nation’s top "civil rights leader." He’s traveled the country in search of the media spotlight, stirring up racial dissension and repeatedly dropping in on the scene when blacks are murdered to charge, without evidence, that the murders were the work of racists (in some cases the murderers have turned out to be black themselves). He’s appropriated biblical language to denounce domestic political opponents, likening Ronald Reagan to Herod, while embracing anti-American dictators like Castro and Khadafy. And yet, with few exceptions, he’s gotten a free ride in the media, respectfully treated as what he’s called himself: "the conscience of the Democratic Party." (Though as one of those exceptions, a conservative magazine once quipped, "being a conscience isn’t the same as having one.")

How does he do it? The answers won't come as a total surprise to you if you've spent awhile dealing with the left on your campus.

To begin with, racial politics have a way of overriding all the rules we’re supposed to observe, including King’s famous statement that the color of our skin isn’t what counts, but the content of our character. White critics of black leftists are racists, while black critics are worse: they’re traitors. Indeed, no Jackson critics have taken more heat than his black ones: Chicago Tribune reporters Barbara Reynolds and Angela Parker, for example, were subjected to an intense campaign of threats and slanders by Jackson and his followers after they reported unflattering and shifty aspects of the reverend’s dealings.

But this approach isn’t restricted to racial issues. It’s really the old communist version of morality: Whatever advances the revolution is moral, whatever impedes it is immoral — and for the "revolution," read, the interests of leaders of the political left. It’s a convenient rule. It takes morality entirely out of the realm of how you behave in daily life — what you do, how you treat people — and bases it instead on what side you choose to back in public-policy and cultural battles.

By this measure, Bill Clinton and Jesse Jackson get to be on the side of the angels, no matter how much their behavior smacks more of the fallen variety. Even the rules of personal conduct that the left claims to cherish are suspended: a wolfish and predatory approach to women that should enrage feminists, shifty financial moves that should’ve started liberals screaming about the corruption of Big Money. We all remember how Clinton’s defenders grew more fervent with every revelation of his sleaze, and when Jackson returned from his three-day "withdrawal from public life" in January, he was greeted by a crowd of Chicago pastors with a standing ovation and chants of "we love Jesse Jackson."

You may be outraged by all this, and I'm with you all the way. But don't be surprised by it. To judge by their fan following, Jackson and Clinton aren't really aberrations of the left. More and more, they're looking like its role models.