Remember David Vitter?

Earlier this year, Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), who was named in the DC Madam prostitution scandal, co-sponsored the Marriage Protection Amendment, which would amend the Constitution to declare that marriage “shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman.” Now, “as he seeks to shore up his bona fides with conservative voters,” Vitter has introduced legislation slashing funding for family planning services:

The Louisiana senator has introduced an amendment to the omnibus spending bill before the Senate to drastically cut funding for family planning programs. Vitter’s amendment states that “none of the funds appropriated under this Act shall be made available to Planned Parenthood for any purpose under title X of the Public Health Service Act.”

ThinkProgress goes on to note that Vitter may be trying to outmaneuver pontential primary opponent Tony Perkins - he of the Family Research Council.

But this also strikes me as another manifestation of a dynamic we’ve been seeing with the Rush business. Certainly if I’m a conservative who doesn’t like abortion or family planning in general - sex should always result in babies! - then I like what Vitter’s doing here, regardless of his past dalliances. And indeed - if I’m on the lizard-brain tribalist conservative stripe, maybe this is even a way that Vitter once again becomes “one of us,” if in fact he was ever excommunicated in the first place.

We’ll get into this in the vid a bit later; but we’ve long talked about how the Limbaugh faction of the right is based upon tribalism: Us and them. “They,” of course, are complete moral degenerates, at once pathetically weak yet terrifyingly strong, all of which is even more reason for the tribe to band tightly together.

This type of conservatism is long on the “personal responsibility.”

But are they actually more personally responsible than the rest of society?

Take Rush himself, a thrice-married former drug addict. His fans forgive him all this, of course - but if in fact someone like Olbermann were a thrice-married former drug addict, wouldn’t Rush’s fans cite this as proof positive of his personal irresponsibility?

Becuase that’s what liberals do, in conservative world - make bad choices based on faulty ideology. It means, in fact, that they are bad people.

But when things like this happen to conservatives, they just sort of happen; it does not mean they are bad people, because they can’t be - in that they’re one of us.