The same Louisiana Republican Party that 30 years ago refused to censure former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke decided last Saturday to censure Sen. Mitt Romney.

The mind reels. The stomach sickens…

Surely someone in the Louisiana Republican hierarchy knows the party’s own history involving censure. In 1989, after Duke had won a surprise upset in a special election for a state legislative seat, conservative RSCC member Beth Rickey tracked Duke to what amounted to a national neo-Nazi meeting and then caught him selling Nazi-related tracts from his state legislative office. She and fellow committee member Neil Curran very publicly urged the RSCC to censure the Ku Kluxer.

As national news media covered the 1989 meeting, most of the RSCC members balked. They offered a variety of reasons.