(This analysis of the Louisiana GOP's bifurcated reception of L'Affaire Vitter is timely and informative. - promoted by pointecoupeedemocrat)
While David Vitter waits in an undisclosed location until the coast is clear, the Republican spin machine is in damage control mode, but if anything demonstrates the divisions and fractures within the Republican Party, particularly the Louisiana Republican Party, it is their uneven, uncertain, and unbalanced reaction to the Vitter scandal. Some are rightfully angry. After all, Vitter violated the sanctity of the very institution he so vehemently sought to "protect." He is a man who sold himself to voters on a platform of Christian morality and conservativism, a man who first ascended to national politics after Bob Livingston resigned. And that now seems somewhat ironic. Because the "crime" committed by Livingston, adultery, pales in comparison to what Vitter has admitted, that of being a serial john. Others, like paid media consultant and conservative pundit Lee Fletcher, are doing their best to divert attention away from Vitter's trangressions and onto the "real culprit." Fletcher would have his audience believe the Vitter scandal is the result of a grand conspiracy, allegedly ordered and orchestrated by a seemingly endless list of former and current public officials. To be sure, Fletcher doesn't deny Vitter's improprieties, though he writes as if forgiveness is a perfunctory obligation of Louisiana citizens. When reading Fletcher's hurried and often garbled responses to this controversy, one can see the nascency of the Vitter counter-attack: the discrediting of Jeanette Maier, the glorification and embellishment of Vitter's accomplishments, the attempt to assign "privacy" to the details of the controversy, the underhanded smearing of Senator Landrieu, and the construction of an impossibly complicated alliance of Vitter foes who worked to "time" this story as "political payback" for the defeat of the immigration reform bill. (Fletcher, predictably, fails to mention or acknowledge that Senator Landrieu voted WITH Vitter on this bill and even voted for Vitter's amendments).
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