RALEIGH – There was a little news today about the strange and pathetic case of Nate Pendley, a Winston-Salem attorney and Republican candidate for North Carolina Court of Appeals who keeps getting himself into trouble – and into the headlines.

His latest stumble was a federal lawsuit he filed to challenge the outcome of the recent legislative redistricting case in state court. His claims were weak, and he later dropped the suit. But in the course of making his filing, Pendley used language to describe state supreme court justices that, apparently, run afoul of ethical rules and got him into trouble with a federal judge. Today, Pendley went before a federal panel to defend himself. It wasn’t pretty, as you can read here (http://www.heraldsun.com/state/6-261488.html).

I am not a Republican, so I guess that party rules and procedures aren’t really my business, but I do want to comment on the complaints of Pendley and his supporters (a dwindling number, I would hazard to guess) that state GOP officials are unfairly intervening in his primary to squelch his candidacy. You can read more about the squabble here (http://newsobserver.com/news/nc/story/1679788p-1700418c.html).

Let’s face it: Pendley is a special case. Surely political parties, like other organizations, do get to establish some ground rules to generate results that reflect well on themselves. And surely party officials have the right and responsibility to side with one candidate over another in a primary when extraordinary circumstances exist.

For example, when David Duke was running for various posts in Louisiana and elsewhere, it was entirely appropriate for party leaders to denounce him and to side with others against him in primaries. Few would view such intervention as overturning the broader principle of staying neutral in intra-party fights.

I’m not saying that Pendley is a neo-Nazi or anything. I am just noting that exceptional cases call for exceptional remedies. Just his comments about his primary rival, Wake Judge Ann Marie Calabria – that he chose her to run against because people might think she was a foreigner, given her name (see http://www.ncgop.org/news/Charlotte-Pendly_Name_Game-070502.html) – represent in my mind a pretty good case for exceptional remedies.