In times past, no public figure would want to be associated with dirty political tricks. Nowadays, however, Lawrence O'Donnell is enthusiastically flaunting the fact that the Democrats have stooped to the sleazy tactic of outing gays as a campaign tactic. The McLaughlin Group panelist and former producer of The West Wing has no qualms about his party engaging in sleaze as he pointed out in his October 5 Blog in The Huffington Post:
The LA Times has outed Kirk Fordham today. He will not be the last closeted gay Republican outed by this scandal.
So is this outing of Republican gays based on some important moral principle? Not according to O'Donnell. It is strictly a sleazy campaign tactic that is supposed to keep Evangelical Republicans from supporting their party at the polls this November as O'Donnell readily admits:
The Republican base--the Evangelical get-out-the-vote troops--are going to be devastated when they discover how many closeted gay Republicans were involved in policing Mark Foley in the House of Representatives.
As Peter Mulhern wrote in Real Clear Politics about the cynical Democrat tactic of trying to drive a wedge between Evangelicals and Republicans:
Democrats didn't keep Mark Foley's sins on ice and serve them up shortly before an election to make Dennis Hastert look negligent. They did it to drive a wedge between the GOP and its evangelical supporters by publicizing the fact that the Republican leadership in Congress gave the benefit of a substantial doubt to a known homosexual.
If O'Donnell were writing a West Wing episode in which one of the parties were engaging in outing gays for political advantage, you can bet he would make sure it would have been the EVIL Republicans who were doing the outing. However, in real life O'Donnell is more than happy to enthusiastically support this dirty campaign tactic if it helps the Democrats at the polls. One can only imagine the media outrage if a prominent Republican had written approvingly about outing gay Democrats for political advantage. In the case of O'Donnell the only sounds coming from the MSM about this new Democrat tactic, other than the L.A. Times performing the outings for the benefit of the Democrats, are the chirping of crickets.
A sampling of responses to O'Donnell's promotion of dirty politics as a campaign strategy can be seen at the DUmmie FUnnies.