Mike Rogers of Blogactive, who is widely credited with setting the outing of Sen. Larry Craig in motion, wrote yesterday to disavow my assertion that two Republican senators were on his list to be outed.
If there are more outings in the offing, it will be interesting to see if the GOP continues its pursuit of moral relativism by allowing Sen. Vitter to stay in office while forcing out another one of their own because he is gay.
“Come on guys,” Rogers wrote. “Do the fact checking. I am not Down With Tyranny I am Blogactive. Please get my name off this rumor and innuendo…IT’S NOT ME.”
Rogers was referring to the story, Four More Top GOP Outings Could Be in the Offing, published on Sept. 4.
Rogers has a reputation for being careful about his reporting, and the attributions were confused, so I removed links to Rogers (including one to his site, Blogactive, and another to Counterpunch) but preserved sourcing to this and other assertions by Klein:
Interesting that [Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky)] is moving rapidly against his fellow homosexual [Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho] — who loudly denies having done anything wrong — while he never did a thing when it came to David Diapers Vitter (R-Louisiana), who admitted to hiring prostitutes (a crime). The right-wing grassroots is howling for homo blood and McConnell is more than aware how quickly that could turn against him — and Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who is already in trouble with the violently homophobic Know Nothing wing of the GOP for his support of Bush’s immigration agenda.
Meanwhile, my colleague Trish noticed that ABC buried a lede in the final paragraphs of its story about Larry Flynt and Wendy Cortez, the New Orleans woman who says she had a four-month sex-for-pay relationship with Sen. David Vitter, the GOP family values ideologue from Louisiana:
“We’ve got a lot more coming,” claimed Flynt. “There is one more gay senator or congressman, and he also votes against matters of self-interest all the time. … I think he should go, he’s at the top of the agenda now.”
If there are more outings in the offing, it will be interesting to see if the GOP continues its pursuit of moral relativism by allowing Vitter, who has admitted illegally paying female prostitutes for sex, to stay in office because he would be replaced by a Democrat, while forcing another closeted gay congressman because his seat is safely Republican.