Responding to the insulting claim from right-wingers that Sonia Sotomayor is a “racist,” at least one prominent Republican said, enough:

“I think it's terrible,” Sen. John Cornyn, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told NPR's “All Things Considered” Thursday. “This is not the kind of tone any of us want to set when it comes to performing our constitutional responsibilities of advise and consent.”

It's an interesting development not only because it highlights how the Republican Party has completely lost control of the GOP Noise Machine, which rejects any semblance of adult supervision. But it's also telling that the Republican senator called out Limbaugh and Gingrich's “racist” nonsense while the so-called liberal media hasn't said boo about it.

I foolishly thought that when Gingrich made his “racist” claim that it would set off a media firestorm of sorts with all sort of commentators denouncing the hateful allegation and pointing out that likening a single sentence from a esteemed judge's speech eight years ago with racism and America's dark history of Jim Crow laws and lynchings, for instance, was beyond the pale and that Gingrich ought to apologize.

Instead, the press simply treated the “racist” attack as straight news. The Times, the Post, all the networks they all did the same thing: Gingrich called Sotomayor a racist. Period. They all acted like it was common place, like that's what happens to all Supreme Court nominees; within hours of their introduction to the public they're labeled racists. That's part of the process. And that Gingrich's wildly incendiary claim was normal.

It's not. It's unprecedented. But the press wouldn't say so. Instead, it took a conservative member of Congress to state the obvious--it's terrible.