The GOPfather

Many of my (much bigger) brother and sister blogs have cited a list of Dems who voted to censure Clinton. The point is to shame for them being too chickenshit to support Russ Feingold's bid to censure Bush for FISAgate.

A good point.

Besides donkey spinelessness, though, there's another point to observe: the GOP's complete lack of such handwringing when one of their own commits wrongs far more injurious to the country than cheating on his wife.

If you can't think of what sort of wrongs those might be, please don't operate heavy machinery.

The Repubs, of course, live by the Mafia code — closing ranks no matter what. Every vote is 100% partisan, and every budget-busting bill they spew out is rubber-stamped by the prez.

Washington Monthly's Paul Glastris has chronicled where this began:

Early on in Clinton's presidency, GOP leaders explicitly decided to make the failure of Clinton's presidency their overriding goal, regardless of, and indeed in spite of, his attempts to move to the middle. The most telling moment came during Clinton's second big initiative, health-care reform. By any objective measure, the United States had--and still has--a terrible system, which spent far more per capita on health care than any other country while leaving a higher percentage of our population uninsured than in any other advanced industrialized nation. While many Republicans were skeptical of Clinton's preferred solution to the problem, they at first accepted a responsibility to pass some sort of plan. Yet they came to be persuaded by the advice of conservative operative William Kristol, who urged in a series of influential memos that the GOP oppose the Clinton plan "sight unseen," and commit to sinking whatever plan was devised--on the grounds that successful passage of any plan would keep the Democratic Party in power. In keeping with this advice, Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole even abandoned his own health-reform proposal, the better to create gridlock.

When the Republicans took over Congress in 1995, the polarization began to get even worse....