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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Safire and Novak spin themselves silly over Kerry's Mary Cheney comment; Buchanan equates gays with alcoholics and pedophiles. Plus: Freepers trade blows over Jon Stewart's takedown of Tucker Carlson.
Oct 20, 2004 | Much has been said about John Kerry's reference to Mary Cheney during the final presidential debate. But with the rights of same-sex couples and gay clergy under attack at the climax of election season, it's worth looking at just how disingenuous and downright nasty some conservatives have gotten over the issue.
Salon's Scott Rosenberg has already pointed out the absurdity of New York Times columnist William Safire claiming that "only political junkies knew that a member of the Cheney family serving on the campaign staff was homosexual," and labeling Kerry's comment the "lowest blow," as if Kerry had maliciously outed the proudly and publicly gay Mary Cheney.
In the very same column, Safire himself acknowledged that Cheney's sexual orientation was "no secret" -- even if one wants to believe, as Safire argued, that a uniformly virtuous press had respectfully kept it quiet.
"The vice president, to show it was no secret or anything his family was ashamed of, had referred to it briefly twice this year, but the press -- respecting family privacy -- had properly not made it a big deal. The percentage of voters aware of Mary Cheney's sexual orientation was tiny."
Safire, who decried Kerry's comment as part of an orchestrated attack by the Dems, might want to check his analysis with fellow columnist Robert Novak, who points out just how widely known the information already was.
"Kerry campaign sources say there was no plan for Kerry to talk about Ms. Cheney last Wednesday, and it never came up in the debate prep," Novak wrote on Monday. "The senator's intimates say he was trying to compliment the Cheneys, but there is absolutely nothing complimentary in what he said. Many Republicans see a calculated plot to depress Bush's social conservative base by revealing the vice president's daughter as a lesbian. But her sexual orientation is such common knowledge on the right that the alleged Democratic plot would be foolish to undertake."
Instead, Novak saw an offhand maliciousness on Kerry's part.
"Kerry's comments appear to be spontaneous -- and unpleasant. Faced with President Bush's answer in the debate that he did not know whether he believed 'homosexuality is a choice,' Kerry blurted out they should go ask Mary Cheney, who 'would tell you that she's being who she was, she's being who she was born as.' This sounded like an effort to impute hypocrisy on the part of an opponent seeking to ban gay marriage."
The National Review's William Buckley was more attuned to the nuances of the issue.
"It is not in question that Mary Cheney's gayness had already become a part of the cast of characters in the political play. Senator Kerry was in no sense 'outing' someone who had hidden her sexual impulses. So that the question narrowed to whether what was said was an expression of magnanimity and inclusiveness, or whether it was a bid for votes from the bigoted.
"This last interpretation of it was taken by an evangelical Christian politician, Gary Bauer, who ran for the presidency four years ago. He reasoned as follows: that traditional-values voters would react to the public reference as to an animadversion against the Bush ticket, and that by saying what he had said, Kerry could reasonably hope 'to knock l or 2 percent off in some rural areas by causing people to turn on the president.' This view holds that Kerry was in fact trading on bigotry. That position is of course irreconcilable with the position that Mr. Cheney has profited politically from publicizing his daughter's gayness -- that he has, in effect, said to the gay community: 'Look, my own beloved daughter is a member of the Cheney family, and a member also of the gay community. You can hardly suspect in the GOP ticket prejudice against gays, when you see that we have one in the family, whom we cherish?'"
And while Robert Novak and others brushed straight past Bush's "I don't know" if "homosexuality is a choice," former Reform Party presidential candidate Pat Buchanan characterized Bush's non-answer as "honest." Then he offered his own honest appraisal of the issue.
"To some of us, homosexuality is an affliction, like alcoholism, and hellishly difficult to control. Why some folks can take or leave alcohol -- while others can enjoy it in moderation, and others cannot stop drinking without help and must swear off it for life or it will kill them -- remains a mystery of nature. Homosexuality seems to be like that."
Buchanan, apparently able to control his own afflictions, went on to lament men who can't control theirs. He also added pedophilia to the same list.
"A contemporary of this writer and rising conservative star in the House, with a wonderful family, lost it all when caught trolling D.C.'s tenderloin district for teenage boys. Catholic priests have dishonored the church to which they have dedicated entire lives and disgraced themselves by abusing altar boys. In such cases, the behavior seems almost suicidal. Clearly, there is a compulsion here that is, at times, terribly difficult to resist, a sexual compulsion that seems far more rare among normal men."
The folly of dirty campaigning
New York Times columnist David Brooks weighed in Tuesday on down-and-dirty campaign rhetoric:
"The truth is that voters are not idiots. They are capable of independent thought. If you attack your opponent wildly, ruthlessly, they will come to their own conclusions."
His comments came one day after President Bush, in a "major speech" carried live on the Fox News Channel, fired off a litany of flagrant distortions about John Kerry. Bush claimed that Kerry will fight terrorists "only after America is hit," that Kerry "thinks we need permission from foreign capitals" when "we act to defend ourselves," and that in a Kerry administration, "America's overriding goal in Iraq would be to leave, even if the job is not done."
Oh, wait... Brooks was criticizing the rhetoric of the other presidential candidate in his column, "Kerry off the Leash."
