Ensign won't resign but he deserves to be called a hypocrite

After admitting an affair yesterday, Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) resigned his leadership position as Chair of the Senate Republican Policy Committee (the number four spot in the house GOP leadership) but declined to resign from the Senate.

As a matter of fact, I will say that I support his decision not to resign. That's because it is up to the voters of Nevada to decide whether they feel that whatever he may have done in his personal life disqualifies him from serving. I'm not endorsing his affair, but let's be honest here-- if all the adulterers in Congress were caught and resigned, it would be sort of like baseball without steroid users; the number of faces that'd be missing would likely be massive. However, I've never felt that what people do in their personal life has, or should have, any affect on how well they do their job. I disagree with almost everything that Senator Ensign stands for but that's a completely separate issue from his personal life.

However, where he does deserve a box on the ears for this is in the personal hypocrisy department. In fact, (as Nate Silver points out) Ensign has in the past called for Bill Clinton and Larry Craig to resign after they got in trouble for their sexual exploits.

Not that Ensign is the first Republican to engage in this kind of hypocrisy of course. Remember that the impeachment charge against Bill Clinton was led in the House by Speaker Newt Gingrich and pit-bull hatchet man Dan Burton. As we now know, both Gingrich and Burton were covering up their own affairs at the same time they were moralizing about Bill Clinton's. And let's not forget Republicans like Larry Craig and David Vitter who got where they were precisely by preaching about morality.

Yes, Democrat Eliot Spitzer became Governor of New York the same way, but he got what he had coming-- Spitzer could have ridden out getting caught doing a one-night stand with a prostitute but the hypocrisy of a guy who had run on his record as a prosecutor of sending other people to prison for the same thing pretty much guaranteed that he had no other option than to resign.

Ensign hasn't sent anyone to prison but he has certainly preached about morality and for that he deserves to be branded as a hypocrite.

Say what you will about Bill Clinton, but at least he never criticized anyone else's sex life.

Newt's latest attack on Sotomayor: Same as the last one, except with an appeal to nazis and klansmen

Last week Newt Gingrich referred to Judge Sotomayor as a racist. That didn't sit very well with his fellow Republicans, so he took the word back.

Then yesterday on CBS's 'Face the Nation,' Newt added an extra syllable.



He called her a 'racialist,' apparently having read an anti-Sotomayor article in the right-wing National Review by Kathryn Jean Lopez that appeared last Wednesday.

To the uninformed it might have sounded like he was calling her a racist again, and in fact he was, but with a clear message by using a coded term for it.

If you look into the word, 'racialist,' it isn't just a mispronunciation (though its origin is that it is the British term for the word, 'racist.')

If you go to various white supremacist sites you'll see that they've been using the term as an alternative to 'racist' for years, such as on this neo-Nazi website or this transcript of an interview from 'the Klan Show' on White Pride TV.

Among committed white supremacists the term 'racialist' is used and recognized by each other as meaning, 'racist' and in particular 'white nationalist' but being in less common usage (though Newt seems to want to change that) it is more specific to the extreme right.

Now, I can understand how Newt recognizes that the Republican Party's base of old, white conservative fundamentalists is declining and he needs to reach out beyond the party's collapsing tent and bring some new people inside, but I don't think he will save the GOP if the people he's reaching out to are skinheads, nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.