Well, he’s at it again. The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky posted yet another anti-Republican rant when he declared today that Senator David Vitter (R-La.) was “America’s most contemptible Senator.” Vitter announced that he will run for governor of Louisiana in 2015 and the Beast's teaser headline seethed with contempt, "Vitter slithers back to Bayou.”
Tomasky seemed to have an unusual amount of contempt and disgust for Vitter in his January 22 piece. Tomasky began his Vitter hit piece with an anecdote from an unnamed Democratic Senator, who said “on the S.O.B. factor the senator’s response was immediate: David Vitter.”
Tomasky had not one nice or remotely non-hateful thing to say about the Louisiana Republican, as he claimed that Vitter was a “nasty piece of work…he doesn’t seem to like anybody. He loathes senior senator Mary Landrieu, he detests Governor Bobby Jindal, he despises the media. They all pretty much hate him back.” Tomasky provided no evidence for his vicious attacks on Vitter but seemed content making wild accusations to smear the senator.
Tomasky summed up his main opposition to Vitter by asking:
I’ve always wondered: How in the world did he survive that hooker business? Not only did he admit he was a client of Deborah Jeane Palfrey’s escort service. She then went and hanged herself. Not over him personally. Over the whole mess, and staring at serious jail time. But still. Extramarital relations are one thing, with a staffer or a woman of accomplishment; politicians almost always slog their way through that. But here we had the guy calling on hookers, and the dead body of the madam. And Vitter skated through it and sailed to reelection two years later. How?
Tomasky went one step further and claimed that in his 2010 reelection bid Senator Vitter ran “vile and racist” campaign ads directed at his Democratic challenger Charlie Melancon. Tomasky loves to use the racist theme in attacking conservatives, as he did in November last year when he attacked conservatives as racist and anti-Democracy in response to a small Colorado town voting to secede from the state.
While Vitter’s dalliances with prostitutes were certainly reprehensible and wrong, does that justify a supposedly non-judgmental -- about bedroom matters, that is -- leftist slamming him as “America’s most contemptible Senator?” Is Vitter say worse than Harry Reid, who during the 2013 government shutdown blocked a bipartisan House bill to fund veterans programs and national memorials throughout the shutdown?
Are Vitter's transgressions worse than a former Democratic president -- whom polls show is still widely popular nationally -- who lied under oath and obstructed justice in a federal investigation all to keep hidden his improper sexual relationship with a White House intern?
Readers shouldn’t be alarmed though at Tomasky’s hyperbolic language, as he is known for throwing around vicious attacks at GOPers he despises. For example, just last week, Tomasky claimed that the fight over extending unemployment benefits shows “how radical becomes normal” in the GOP.
But wait, there’s more. In 2012, Tomasky called the 2012 RNC Convention racist, and called then-Virginia Republican Governor Bob McDonnell a “sleazy Christian.” Despite Tomasky’s long history with extreme and incendiary comments directed at conservatives, his latest piece on David Vitter is much more personal and contemptible. Tomasky’s anti-GOP shtick is getting tired, yet The Daily Beast refuses to hold their liberal columnist accountable for his reprehensible rhetoric.
