Come again?

I've had rather a trying day at work, and I'm on call this weekend, and so I decided to indulge in one of my more leisurely and relaxing pass-times -- reading the Huffington Post and looking for really, really dumb celebrity opinions about things. It's always good for a giggle, and thankfully Alec Baldwin comes through.

Alec Baldwin is a very, very funny actor. He is also, from what I gather, considered one of the "smarter" celebrities out there. That wasn't necessarily the impression I got from his rambling, incoherent defense of Mark Sanford.

So South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford had an affair.

Big deal.

Now is a wonderful opportunity to show the country what Democrats/liberals/progressives/unaligned learned from the Clinton era. Whatever personal problems that public officials deal with privately, leave them alone. This could happen to anyone, in any state, regardless of party. Why make the voters of South Carolina suffer while Sanford is skewered? If he wants to resign, so be it. If not, let him deal with it in private.

Well, no. I don't really agree that this could "happen to anyone." Earthquakes happen to anyone. Strep throat happens to anyone. Love affairs happen to those who choose to sleep with people other than their spouses, which we tend to attribute more to a combination of libido and free will than to happenstance.

I understand why Baldwin is defending Sanford, because dude has been there himself, you know? And I agree that cackling and rubbing our hands with glee at the lurid details of the affair is unseemly, and is an impulse we should try to rise above. But, as I said elsewhere, the voters of South Carolina are also entitled to a governor who doesn't vanish into thin air, or spend their taxes on questionable junkets to other countries where his mistress just happens to live. There's more than just the extramarital shenanigans to consider here, Mr. Baldwin.

What really caught my eye was this particularly startling description, however:

The Clinton scandal was one of the most horrific political episodes I have ever witnessed. Henry Hyde and Richard Mellon Scaife and Kenneth Starr, the right-wing's goyish Roy Cohn, chasing down Arkansas state troopers and bank records and real estate documents until they found what they were looking for in Monica Lewinsky's closet. [emphasis mine]

Uh... what? I don't really understand quite what point Baldwin is making by highlighting Starr's gentile status. First of all, the right wing already had a Roy Cohn -- Roy Cohn. Baldwin's formulation is odd, in that most people would use similar phraseology to describe someone similar on the opposite side, as in "the left wing's Latina Scalia" to describe Sonia Sotomayor. Is he implying that the right wing plans to collect an ethnically diverse number of Roy Cohns? Are they scouring Liberty University for a Laotian?

But, more than that, what is Baldwin trying to say about Starr that he clarifies by mentioning his non-Jewishness? Because, to me, it seems like a gratuitous and confusing ethnic dig, made even weirder coming from a fellow gentile. It certainly doesn't enhance an opinion piece already lacking in rhetorical precision.