Andrew Sullivan & Glenn Greenwald on Putz.

We've noted Putz receiving more than a few slaps from these two before--quite a feat since one is a progressive and the other a conservative. And neither of them thought much of Putz's ridiculous "I voted for Corker because mean lefty bloggers were outing Republican senators" post.

Sullivan:

According to Der Spiegel:

Pat Robertson suggested talking points to Republican leaders to distance the party from the Foley scandal: "The best thing they could do would be to say 'Well, this man's gay; he does what gay people do.'"

I wonder if that would make Glenn Reynolds vote Democrat.

Greenwald:

Glenn Reynolds actually said yesterday that he voted for Republican Bob Corker over Democrat Harold Ford in the Tennessee Senate race in large part because of the Mike Rogers outing incident: "ultimately the combination of Ford's "F" rating on gun rights and the sleazy 'outing' behavior of the Democrats was such that I just felt I had to vote Republican in this race" and "not long ago I was thinking that a Democratic majority in Congress wouldn't be so bad; but the sexual McCarthyism from the pro-outing crowd, coupled with the Dems' steadfast refusal to offer anything useful on national security, has convinced me that they just don't deserve a victory with those tactics."

Ken Blackwell was chosen to be the nominee of the Republican Party for Governor in Ohio. He has the support of the entire GOP national political establishment, is an elected Republican official, played a crucial role in George Bush's 2004 victory in Ohio, and has been widely considered a rising Republican star. After Rush Limbaugh (who has long spread insinuations that Hillary Clinton is gay), Sean Hannity (who this week also promoted and defended a new book claiming that Cindy Sheehan had an affair with Lew Rockwell and is an online porn addict) is the most popular GOP pundit in the country.

Exploiting politicians' private sexual behavior generally, and the practice of "outing" specifically, is a tactic used by some of the most important Republican and conservative political figures. By contrast, Mike Rogers is an obscure Internet blogger and I'm not aware of a single prominent Democrat who supports him or has any connections to him. Yet we are told that hatred for outing is a reason to vote against Democrats, because Republicans would never engage in such lowly behavior and have nothing to do with it (Ramesh Ponnuru, to his credit, has condemned Blackwell, though not Republicans generally or "the Right," as a result of this incident).

The lesson we learned this week can be summarized this way:

* Mike Rogers (along with, as Scott Lemieux put it, "a poster at Daily Kos . . . Ward Churchill and the immortal Some Guy With A Sign Somewhere") = Leader and Symbol of the Democratic Party, whose outing activities reflect on all Democrats generally and the Party itself.

* Ken Blackwell, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh = obscure nobodies who have nothing at all to do with Republicans generally and whose use of people's private sexual behavior for political gain says nothing at all about the Republican Party.

Putz isn't making many friends these days.