Take David Vitter, as Frank Rich does and with a couple of swipes fells him and most of the Republican leadership.
Newspapers back home also linked the senator to a defunct New Orleans brothel, a charge Mr. Vitter denies. That brothel’s former madam, while insisting he had been a client, was one of his few defenders last week. “Just because people visit a whorehouse doesn’t make them a bad person,” she helpfully told the Baton Rouge paper, The Advocate.
The honest madam compares well with most Republicans.
Mr. Vitter is not known for being so forgiving a soul when it comes to others’ transgressions. ...Mr. Vitter is a holier-than-thou family-values panderer. He recruited his preteen children for speaking roles in his campaign ads and, terrorism notwithstanding, declared that there is no “more important” issue facing America than altering the Constitution to defend marriage.
But hypocrisy is a hardy bipartisan perennial on Capitol Hill, and hardly news. This scandal may leave a more enduring imprint. It comes with a momentous pedigree. Mr. Vitter first went to Washington as a young congressman in 1999, to replace Robert Livingston, the Republican leader who had been anointed to succeed Newt Gingrich as speaker of the House. Mr. Livingston’s seat had abruptly become vacant after none other than Mr. Flynt outed him for committing adultery. Since we now know that Mr. Gingrich was also practicing infidelity back then — while leading the Clinton impeachment crusade, no less — the Vitter scandal can be seen as the culmination of an inexorable sea change in his party.
Doesn't feel like that much of a change yet?
Not a single Republican heavyweight showed up at Jerry Falwell’s funeral.
The phoniness is no longer in vogue.
And it is President Bush who will be left holding the bag in history. As the new National Intelligence Estimate confirms the failure of the war against Al Qaeda and each day of quagmire signals the failure of the war in Iraq, so the case of the fallen senator from the Big Easy can stand as an epitaph for a third lost war in our 43rd president’s legacy: the war against sex.
That leaves Mitt Romney and the irony, pointed out by Bill Maher, that he's pretty much the only Republican candidate who hasn't had multiple marriages. Ha ha. Mormon joke. Maher predicts with considerable force that Rudy Giuliani will be the next president. Rich seems to second that. Romney is, of course, a neocon, and neocons are going the way of the other hypocrisies.
By this point it’s safe to say that even some Republican primary voters are sick enough of their party’s preacher politicians that they’d consider hitting a cigar bar or two with Judith Giuliani.
Meanwhile, across the fold, Maureen Dowd takes Judith Warner's op-ed in yesterday's Times and ups the ante. She notices gender switches all over the place, not just in Hillary Clinton's manly strength and Robert Gates' honest tears. (Only in America is that a gender switch, by the way. When are we going to be so arrogantly and persistently idiotic in our ideas about gender and sex? Never, it seems...)
Let's give Dowd the last word here -- she has a firm grip on the endless, elusive phoniness that has replaced Al Qaeda as the chief threat to America. She, too, was relieved to see Robert Gates evince a real emotion.
The obtuse W. seems incapable of understanding how inappropriate his sunny spirits are. And the callous Cheney’s robo-aggression continues unabated. (What could be more nerve-racking than the thought of President Cheney, slated to happen for a couple of hours yesterday while Mr. Bush had a colonoscopy? Could it be — a Medal of Freedom for Scooter?)
Mr. Gates captured the sadness we feel about American kids trapped in a desert waiting to be blown up, sent there by men who once refused to go to a warped war themselves.
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