Take Republican Louisiana Senator David Vitter. As any news junkie will recall, he was, ah, exposed in the media earlier this summer for his extracurricular activities, courtesy of that upstanding moral beacon, Larry Flynt. Larry's intrepid research staff went through notorious DC Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey's phone records and outed his adventures in Nighttown, along with those of a hapless Bush staffer.
The resignation calls from the MSM were swift and immediate. The staffer exited stage right, but Vitter managed to stay on, presumably after finding Jesus again.
Now, from the "here we go again" department, we get word today that Republican Idaho Senator Larry Craig attracted a little police attention recently by playing a peculiar version of footsie earlier this month in a Minnesota airport restroom. The well-rehearsed Resignation Chorus has predictably fired up again.
We'd not be the first to observe that the Resignation Chorus—recruited, rehearsed, and promoted by the Democrats and their lefty pals in the MSM—rarely if ever gets fired up if a Democrat somehow stumbles into the crosshairs. A Democrat like Vitter's fellow Louisiana pol, Representative Bill Jefferson who got caught on video brazenly accepting a bribe from an FBI informant and was later found to have $100K in bills stored in his freezer. Kinda gives a new meaning to the term "cold, hard cash."
Oh, there were a few halfhearted demands for Jefferson's resignation. But as usual, the "innocent until proven guilty" Democrats circled the wagons around Jefferson. He remains in Congress after, of course, winning re-election last year with this cloud over his head. A Republican would have been long gone by now. Doesn't say much for the common sense of either the Democrats or the voters in Jefferson's district. But then, Dems have never claimed to have any common sense at all. Only a sense of loyalty and an insatiable lust for power. Which we'll get back to in a sec.
We're used to hypocrisy from the Democrats and from the MSM. It's a thing that they do. Having no shame, they regard this kind of stuff as business as usual, smearing and slandering their opponents into resigning for the kind of thing they themselves perpetrate with alarming regularity. (Of course, it also helps immensely if your opponent behaves like an irresponsible idiot.) It's all about power. Getting it and holding it for enough consecutive terms that you can bend the entire bureaucracy into serving your party's will while subverting the other side at every chance. Republicans have yet to figure this out, even after having endured their post-Rooseveltian desert wanderings.
And the Dems are more than happy to get an assist from nonpartisan intellectuals like women's rights activist and noted constitutional scholar Larry Flynt, who, mysteriously, has yet to find a single Democrat perp in the DC Madam's phone records. Flynt's excuse for his apparent leftward tilt, of course, is that the Republicans are moral hypocrites. We hate to point out to Larry minor Democrat peccadillos like Chapaquiddick, the antics of Barney Frank's roomie, etc. Or the fact that sleazy Republican Senator Packwood got booted for occasionally grabbing ass while a certain Democrat president skated after lying about shagging ass.
But we know fine distinctions like these are lost in the grandeur of Flynt's towering intellect. Bottom line: Republican miscreants get hounded to resign and usually do so. Dems get a pass. Or, as one writer states it, citing additional examples from the past:
There seems to be a pattern here. Republicans caught in sex scandals either resign or are voted out of office. Democrats caught in sex scandals stay in office and are re-elected time and time again by their constituents.But something even more galling is at work here. We expect the unscrupulous Dems to push for Republican resignations, the better to grab their, er, seats in the next election. Everything is fair, after all, if it gives America's only legitimate political party the opportunity to walk away with a free or nearly-free Congressional seat.
What bothers us more is how the Republicans pile on their own. For example, Hugh Hewitt, whom we greatly admire, does just that today, shortly and succinctly. Others will follow suit.
We appreciate our fellow conservatives taking the high moral ground as they should. And Craig is not always a reliable conservative, either, as his voting record shows.
Problem here is that the Republicans, again and again, join with the Democrats and the media in trashing their own, while the Democrats rarely if ever do likewise. The result tends to be political disaster as we witnessed in 2006. Look, it's always fun to appear morally superior. Heck, the Dems do it all the time while laughing into their sleeves.
But, as we discovered last fall, the Republicans' hold on power remains tenuous at best. The deck's still stacked against them by the Democrats who've never met a moral scruple they couldn't easily overlook. They count on Republicans to be, in a political sense, the Stupid Party. And the Repubs never disappoint.
Look, Republican dudes. If you're going to run for office and play the moral high ground card, you'd better be standing on and planning to hold the moral high ground. If not, get the nonsense out right out front, and if you can still win, fine. Giuliani's been doing this all along on the campaign trail, and acknowledging the skeletons tumbling out of his closet right now will help him later on the campaign trail.
But Republican supporters: okay, right, we have to selectively throw out the closet lefties and RINOs in the party. But let's be a little judicious here about the moral high ground stuff. It's hard enough to stay in power when the left controls most means of communication and uses it to smear our side 24/7. But we have to try to level the playing field, even if the results are less than pleasant from time to time. Not to play rough, just like our opponents do all the time, is the wrong tactic right now. We're not nearly done making the courts impervious to revisionists who like to legislate from the bench. And we're not even 10% finished with the Global War On Terror (GWOT), which our opponents would dearly love for us to lose.
We need to win both of these battles. Decisively. And that's not going to happen if Republicans continue to join America's Socialist Party each and every time they throw rocks at our guys while hiding the sins of their own. It's time to play hardball, people. And if that means occasionally supporting one of our son-of-a-bitches over theirs, so be it. Sometimes winning IS everything.
http://rss.townhall.com/trackback/hughhewitt/7f8fc8be-b9fc-4709-81b1-026d69fbaa66/
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