It was like pulling teeth, but Tuberville finally admits white nationalism is racist

There's big news to report from inside Sen. Tommy Tuberville's brain. After literal months of claiming that white nationalism is not a racist belief, culminating in another interview last Monday in which he repeatedly insisted on it, which led yesterday to a bunch of Republicans being asked about Tuberville's defense of white nationalism and whether they wanted to attach themselves to it, Tuberville has revised his opinion. Sort of. Mostly.

The Alabama senator’s walk back consists of a single statement muttered to reporters stalking him inside the Capitol: "White nationalists are racists."

Holy moly, that was like pulling teeth. You'd think Tuberville was being asked to sacrifice his firstborn son for all the drama involved in getting that statement out of him—and it's pretty clear that he resented every moment of it. When reporters asked him about Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer calling on him to apologize for the racist dodge, Tuberville instead sniffed that Schumer was the one who "needs to apologize."

Yeah, he's mad. We can only imagine how many of Tuberville's aides were involved in sitting him down and convincing him that insisting white nationalism is not racist was not the hill their office wanted to die on. Tuberville's got plenty of other hills to die on; for example, top U.S. military leaders are beginning to push back in force on Tuberville's one-man blockade of top military promotions, with an Air Force general warning senators that "we will lose talent" as a result of Tuberville's stonewalling.