Should have done it along time ago.

In a radio interview with Diane Rehm this morning, right-wing columnist Robert Novak tried to assert his conservative credentials by distancing himself from the Bush White House. “I don’t support this administration,” he said.

“The president’s cut me off the list of conservative columnists that are invited there.” He added, “They consider me a lot of trouble
It would be unsurprising if the White House considered Novak “trouble,” given his unscrupulous journalistic ethics. But nothing in Novak’s previous comments has suggested anything but a close relationship with the White House. Just recently, he said he “never enjoyed such a good source inside the White House” as Karl Rove.

It appears Novak is simply sour over the fact he wasn’t given a 110-minute sit-down interview with President Bush like his counterpart at the New York Times, David Brooks.

Novak explained that his relationships with White Houses are like bad marriages. “It starts nice after the honeymoon and it just gets worse.”

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Should he be judged as he judges others.

In the fall of 1998, David Vitter felt compelled to weigh in on the national debate over the possible impeachment of President Bill Clinton for lying about sex. Vitter was not yet a member of Congress; he was a Republican state representative. And in an October 29, 1998, opinion piece for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Vitter took issue with a previous article, written by two law professors who had argued that impeachment “is a process of removing a president from office who can no longer effectively govern; it is not about punishment.” Given that Clinton was still a capable chief executive, they had maintained, impeachment was not in order.
Vitter, a graduate of Harvard University and Tulane law school and a Rhodes scholar, was aghast at this amoral position. He blasted the law professors for criticizing those congressional Republicans pushing for Clinton’s impeachment. Their argument that impeachment is “not primarily about right and wrong or moral fitness to govern,” he wrote, was utterly wrongheaded. He continued:

Some current polls may suggest that people are turned off by the whole Clinton mess and don’t care — because the stock market is good, the Clinton spin machine is even better or other reasons. But that doesn’t answer the question of whether President Clinton should be impeached and removed from office because he is morally unfit to govern.

The writings of the Founding Fathers are very instructive on this issue. They are not cast in terms of political effectiveness at all but in terms of right and wrong — moral fitness. Hamilton writes in the Federalists Papers (No. 65) that impeachable offenses are those that “proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.”

In considering impeachment, Vitter asserted, Congress had to judge Clinton on moral terms. Decrying the law professors’ failure to see this, Vitter observed, “Is that the level of moral relatively [sic] and vacuousness we have come to?” If no “meaningful action” were to be taken against Clinton, Vitter wrote, “his leadership will only further drain any sense of values left to our political culture.”
Strong words. Now that Vitter, who entered the House of Representatives in 1999 after winning a special election to fill the seat of Representative Bob Livingston (who resigned after being caught in an adultery scandal) and who was elected senator in 2004, has admitted he placed a phone call to the so-called DC Madam, his constituents can only wonder if he will hold himself to the same standards he sought to apply to Bill Clinton.
Perhaps Vitter ought to revisit the issue of whether the absence of moral fitness is a firing offense for a public official.

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