GOP foot-in-mouth disease

First the Senate leader talks about assassinating judges, then the GOP's No. 3 compares Dems to Hitler.

Published May 20, 2005 11:10AM (EDT)

Considering that only 28 percent of Americans support the Republican effort to do away with the Senate filibuster rule, the GOP leadership, suffering a severe case of foot-in-mouth disease, has not done much this week to improve those numbers.

First, on Wednesday, the same day a federal judge whose family was assassinated was testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee about courthouse safety, Sen. Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., described Democratic efforts to opposing some of President Bush's judicial nominees as "leadership-led use of Cloture vote to kill, to defeat, to assassinate these nominees."

Then yesterday on the floor of the Senate, the GOP's No. 3, Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., compared Democrats to Hitler.


By Eric Boehlert

Eric Boehlert, a former senior writer for Salon, is the author of "Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush."

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