Let's do a quick lightning round of recent events. The Mary Cheney hoopla.

I was absolutely sickened by the use of Mary Cheney as a political gambit by both Kerry and Edwards. My partner disagreed -- she thought it was fine. Many of our friends also thought it was OK. I did not. I found it utterly offensive and manipulative. I don't care whether Mary Cheney worked for Coors as a gay liaison. I don't care that she works for her father's campaign office. Mary Cheney has made her own rules and has not thrust herself into the national spotlight to speak publicly. It is unethical and grotesque to tag and stereotype her as "the lesbian" of this presidential campaign.

What gets me is that this was so clearly a Democratic strategy to avoid actually confronting Dick Cheney head-on. What rank cowardice! Come on! This shows you what's happened to the Democrats -- everything is I-feel-your-pain psychology; everything is melting emotion and ostentatious empathy. What the hell do you know, John Edwards, about what's going on in that family? Oh, the wise father so loves the gay daughter: What is this-- Betty Crocker, "Father Knows Best" politics? We're back in the 1950s?

And for Kerry to glibly invoke Mary Cheney as the archetypal lesbian in a nature-vs.-nurture dispute when he had other ready examples on his political side -- Dick Gephardt's daughter or Barney Frank -- just makes the whole thing look obviously calculating. And then the idiocy of that as a tactic at the climactic third debate -- in the following days, instead of all the media attention being focused on Bush's failings, air space was sucked up by this dopey soap opera.

And as a lesbian, I strongly object to the Democrats' amoral use of sexual orientation as a wedge issue. The Democrats are supposed to be pro-gay, and yet they're using an assertion of gayness to unsettle the Evangelical followers of the Republicans. They're deliberately fomenting and reinforcing hostility to gays! What the hell's the matter with the Democratic consultants? I'd like to kick their asses up and down the Eastern seaboard for this Mickey Mouse episode.

Teresa.

Teresa Heinz Kerry obviously speaks her mind. To all reports she had a good rapport with women in small groups on the campaign trail during the primaries. But the Democratic consultants wore both Kerrys down with overbooking. They've looked exhausted and punch-drunk half the time. Teresa's not ready for prime time, but neither was Hillary. Any first lady learns how to be bland and neutral -- Laura Bush has it down, and without losing her humor and spunk.

Teresa will be a sophisticated, issues-oriented hostess in the White House. Lately, however, she's been making some serious gaffes -- as when she said that Laura Bush never had a real job and then apologized for forgetting that Laura had worked for 10 years as a teacher and librarian. This left Teresa wide open to the charge that she doesn't value the role of a homemaker. Unfortunately, that's true for a lot of affluent, upper-middle-class liberal women. That slip of the tongue was all too revelatory -- especially when there's a recent movement among women disillusioned with the workplace and returning home to spend more time with their children. So it was cringe-making. But it's because they're overworking her.

Bill O'Reilly.

Laff riot! I honestly couldn't stop laughing when I saw the news (thanks to Matt Drudge) that Bill O'Reilly, one of Fox TV's biggest conservative stars, was being accused of making lurid phone sex calls to his woman producer. It was just too hilarious to believe. O'Reilly is such a blowhard. He's bizarrely arrogant and politically all over the map. I never watch him since he talks right over his guests -- he's a boorish host. That show is such a waste of time, unless you have low testosterone and want to get jacked up by a squinty-eyed dork pretending he's John Wayne.

I think that, in uncertain times, people like the sound of confidence, even when that confidence is mimed, which is the case with Bush as well as O'Reilly. Unlike Rush or Hannity, O'Reilly doesn't really have core values. And now we know why! Thanks to the wonders of the Web, we have learned that O'Reilly's fantasy life is a high-school orgy of loofah gloves and tropical palms. It's pitiful, in a way -- O'Reilly needs phone sex because he's trapped by his Catholic code. He's in psychosexual paralysis -- he doesn't have the confidence in his low-down desires that Clinton does!

Anything else we should touch on?

Yes. Was I the only person in America to suspect that Saddam Hussein was bluffing about his WMD? The pharaohs and kings of the ancient Near East loved to thump their chests and boast to intimidate their neighbors. Evidently, there was a lack of historical perspective among the feckless advisors who persuaded George W. Bush to rush to war in Iraq.

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