Well shit, Doug, neither did they consider the murder of tens of thousands of Nicaraguan civilians scandalous; nor that everyone from Ronald Reagan down to Fawn Hall was caught lying nakedly and repeatedly both to the public and in courtrooms - so much for the right-wing assertion that "it's not the adultery that's so offensive but the lies and the coverup." Republicans were so shameless that they ran the mercenaries's manager and champion liar Oliver North for the Senate!
This latest scandal is hardly so awful when you compare it with Reagan's Iran-Contra (60,000 dead in Nicaragua by direct U.S. action, plus Allah knows how many dead in the Iran/Iraq war, at least partly due to U.S. connivance) or Nixon's secret wars in Cambodia and Laos (hundreds of thousands killed by direct U.S. action, plus we set up the preconditions for the Pol Pot regime). In this affair, the Republicans have not yet managed to generate a great big pile of freshly butchered foreigners in the pursuance of their domestic politics - not yet, anyway.
So this Stare/Tripe scandal is way far from the worst thing I've seen out of the Republicans. But it does display a hitherto-unseen degree of distastefulness; this IS the most disgusting Republican move I've yet seen. Evidently Republicans are entirely unable to play fair, or even to grasp the concept of "fair." The technical term for victims of this affliction, I believe, is "sociopath."
One's predominant reaction to previous Republican enormities was horror and moral outrage; but to this one, the reaction is mainly revulsion at the depth of their witless indecency; the difference is like how you'd feel watching a murder on the sidewalk, as compared to watching a yowling drunk vomiting in the street. For Stare and Tripe, you want to bring back the pillory; for Reagan, North & Co. you want to re-erect the Nuremburg gallows instead.
Yours WDK - WKiernan at concentric.net