Honorable All

My guess is that the Republican party is fervently wishing that their honorable senator from Nevada, John Ensign, would just go away. Today there is new information out about how Ensign's honorable buddies in the Senate offered him helpful advice in this little matter of his screwing his senior aide's wife and getting caught at it. Turns out, according to Rachel Maddow tonight, said assistant, Doug Hampton, was trying to extort millions in hush money from the honorable Senator Ensign. But thank goodness for Senator Ensign's honorable senate colleagues, all of whom, I gather, including the most high honorable Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) offered sage advice: pay these people off. Give 'em the hush money they want. Which, apparently, the honorable senator from Nevada, did, bestowing on his paramour a $25,000 severance payment in addition to the generous salary he'd been paying her up till then.

This is just some really sordid crap going on here. After this and the Sanford thing in South Carolina, which also gets more odoriferous the more we learn, I daresay we're not going to be witnessing the usual herd of raving GOP moralists on their white horses for a while. Unless of course, you're in Oklahoma.