I agree with you on this -- no one is above criticism. My political hero, Ronald Reagan, maintained US membership in the UN, still kept the Department of Education in place, never adequately reformed welfare, signed the Brady Bill, granted amnesty to illegal aliens, caved-in at the first sign of opposition from Middle East terrorists, and signed a tax increase bill in 1986. I still love the guy.
While no public leader is above criticism, the kind of self-righteous strutting around I see in threads like this, like that posted by others here, people telling us what they think the First Amendment allows and what it doesn't allow, is childish. If they want to leave the Republican Party over something like this, I sincerely doubt they were ever Republicans in the first place. They're "NITS" -- "Naysaying Ivory Tower Snipers," always shooting from their ideological ivory towers at allies in the trenches who are doing the heavy work of turning back the incarnate evil that is the leftist Democrat Party.