Steve Benen, upon learning that the new plan to deal with Craig is to censure both Craig and Vitter:
As far as I can tell, that last part, about censuring Vitter, is new. The GOP has struggled for weeks to explain why Craig’s conduct is, in Mitch McConnell’s word, “unforgivable,” while Vitter’s sex scandals are trivial and inconsequential. If the party is willing to censure both, that would be a pleasant surprise.
That wouldn’t be a pleasant surprise at all. It would be compounding stupid. The damage has been done to these men already, in Craig’s case he has paid his debt to society, and enough with people prying into their private lives (tawdry as they may be).
The reason liberals and libertarians and even moderate Republicans were making a stink out of the whole mess was the hypocrisy- the hypocrisy of these flawed men, conservative Republicans, acting like moralizing chumps by daytime and Deuce Bigelow by night, and the hypocrisy of the Republican party freaking out about Craig while cheering on Vitters.
The last damned thing we want to do is to encourage the GOP to become more a stronghold for moralizing blowhards, and pretending that censure for these men for private transgressions is a “pleasant surprise” is a horrible thing to do. It’s wrong politically, and it is just flat out distasteful on a personal level. Encouraging censure for these men is tantamount to telling Dobson and the blowhards “You are right,” when what we should be telling them to do is to STFU and do something Christian.