The "L" word and the tighties on the right

a great article by Frank Rich on ongoing right wing hypocrisy vis a vis Mr. O'Reilly and lesbians in the family, including:

In the annals of election year 2004, Oct. 13 will be remembered as the day it rained lesbians in red America. That was when we learned that [...] an associate producer on "The O'Reilly Factor," had filed her sexual harassment law suit charging that her boss had an obsessive interest in [...] most persistently, erotic scenarios involving pairs of women. [And] the final presidential debate, in which John Kerry's description of Mary Cheney as a lesbian so riled the Bush-Cheney campaign [...] you'd have thought the vice president's daughter was accused of enlisting in a threesome with Bill O'Reilly. What's followed ever since is an orgy of schadenfreude and hypocrisy almost entertaining enough to take your mind off Iraq (as the Bush-Cheney campaign hopes it will).

[The Wall Street Journal] ...never entertained the thought that Mary Cheney herself has a voice in this matter. She has been openly gay for years. Before the 2000 campaign, she held a job that literally announced her homosexuality:gay and lesbian liaison for Coors, a public marketing assignment that even required her to travel the country with the winner of the 1999 International Mr. Leather competition. She later joined the Republican Unity Coalition, a gay-rights advocacy group formed as an alternative to the similarly inclined Log Cabin Republicans.

From all the outcry [...] with the attendant rhetoric about the evil of exploiting a candidate's "child" in a campaign, you might never guess that the child in question is not Chelsea Clinton at age 12 but a 35-year-old woman [...]. Or that she lives openly with her partner, Heather Poe, whom she brought onstage after the vice presidential debate. Or that she is the paid director of vice presidential operations for the Bush campaign [...] So you have to wonder what motivated the Bush-Cheney brigade to go ballistic over Mr. Kerry's "outing" of Mary Cheney after it had ignored not just John Edwards's previous "outing" but also the earlier "outings" by Bush campaign allies like the Concerned Women for America and the Republican senatorial candidate Alan Keyes. Unlike the Democrats, who spoke respectfully of gay sexual orientation, these right-wing activists trashed the vice president's daughter for sowing anti-family values. But as Andrew Sullivan has pointed out, even when Mr. Keyes attacked Mary Cheney in August for practicing "selfish hedonism," the same Mrs. Cheney, who, "speaking as a mom," called Mr. Kerry "not a good man," spoke not at all. [...]

When Mrs. Cheney hyperbolically implies that even using the word lesbian in 2004 is a slur out of the McCarthy era - "a cheap and tawdry political trick," she said - she is playing a similar game. She is positioning lesbian as a term comparable to child molester. But as Dave Cullen writes in Salon: "It is not an insult to call a proudly public lesbian a lesbian. It's an insult to gasp when someone calls her a lesbian." Mrs. Cheney and her surrogates are in effect doing exactly what Elizabeth Edwards had the guts to say they were doing: they are sending the message to Mr. Rove's four million that they are ashamed of Mary Cheney. They are disowning her under the guise of "defending" her. They are exploiting her for the sake of political expediency even as they level that charge at Democrats. [...]

Sooner or later this untenable level of hypocrisy is going to lead to a civil war within the Republican party. But this hypocrisy is not just about homosexuality - it's about all sexuality, as befits a party that calls for the elimination of Roe v. Wade and the suppression of candid sex education that might prevent teenage pregnancy and AIDS alike.

'Nuff said

"You know, a lot of people are dying around here. We got bigger things on our mind to worry about than who wants to be president."PFC. SAMUEL DANIELS, in Iraq.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/21/politics/campaign/21soldiers.html?oref=login&th

Daughters of the American Revolution

Can't have it both ways, can you? If you hide your daughters and their lesbian life-partners away, you can't use them to soften your Darth Vaderesque countenance, and if you bring them to the VP debate, you risk them being mentioned by the press and your opponent, in the context of the constitutional amendment prohibiting equal marriage being pushed by your party and the President. Great Salon article on the "furor", including the following relevant facts:

Mary Cheney has been happily out of the closet for at least a decade, so John Kerry was hardly dragging her out against her will. She spent the late '90s working as a veritable professional lesbian, as gay and lesbian corporate relations manager for Coors Brewing Co.

Dick Cheney himself has been using her sexuality on the campaign trail. Watch a Human Rights Campaign ad with him on the stump on Aug. 24, 2004: "Lynne and I have a gay daughter ... " The Bush-Cheney administration has shamelessly used homosexuality as a wedge issue, never hesitating to play the sodomite card when it serves their political ends.

John Edwards brought up Mary Cheney in response to a similar gay-rights question just eight days earlier in the veep debate. Dick Cheney responded by thanking him for his kind remarks.

It seems that the way to avoid all this would have been to use the Julia Thorne (such a soap-star name, btw) technique - I'm far away on my farm in Montana and I've issued my one statement to the press months ago. That way, Kerry doesn't have to discuss his annulment or mental health issues ...

Irony, thy name is Bush

So how hilarious is it that, with all the anti-Canadian drug rhetoric we've been hearing - see post below dated 10/13/04 - that NOW they're going to purchase flu vaccines from ... wait for it ... CANADA!

Government officials are continuing to contact companies that make flu vaccines for other countries to see whether they have any excess. That includes a Canadian company, ID Biomedical, that may have up to 1.5 million excess doses that might be made available to the United States.

President Bush, in his debate with Senator John Kerry on Wednesday night, referred obliquely to that when he said the government was "working with Canada" to "help us realize the vaccine necessary to make sure our citizens have got flu vaccinations during this upcoming season."

If the Bush administration imports vaccine based just on Canadian approval, that would depart from its opposition to importing drugs from Canada. That would make the administration quite likely to require approval from the Food and Drug Administration.

The anti-poncho rant

Not from me, although as I think I've already mentioned, I'm skipping this trend, but from Slate - hilarious. It will take more than this article, however, to convince me that Jennifer Aniston ever looks bad.

Ouch!

'80's Supermodel extrordinaire Linda Evangelista gets NAILED by the NY Times:

Age, alas, seems to have caught up with Ms. Evangelista, in the form of a thickening waist and a stiffened gait.

Because 17 year olds can clearly afford to shop at Chanel ...

Tied again

I finally realized what that look on Bush's face while he's "listening" to Kerry in the debates reminds me of - it's as though he's listening to him through a translator, with time-delay for comprehension.

And AGAIN with the matching ties? I appeal to the fashion gods, Lagerfield, Dior, Klein, Dolce & Gabbana! Someone's got to coordinate this stuff!

Just in time for the third debate

my main comment on the last one ... from the leader of the only superpower, in reference to imported drugs from Canada:

...it looks like it's from Canada, and it might be from a third world.

I'm going to try to tone down my disgust here and take this step by step. A third world? Are you referring to some third planet out there? What about the second other world ... is that where Cheney's bunker is hidden? Additionally, "Third World" isn't not very pc international politico-speak, Mr. Pre-emptive Striker. We don't refer to countries with lesser economic status than our own numerically anymore, we use "developed" and "developing".

Then there's the issue of what, exactly, is so wrong with Canadian drugs aside from the lower price. Canadians take these drugs every day without unusual side effects, they don't come to us via Sierra Leone or even Mexico, and there are thousands of Americans riding buses to Canada to have their prescriptions filled every weekend already. All we need is for one of these buses to get into an accident, and we can blame the Republicans for not just bringing the drugs to seniors' porches. "Forced to board dangerous public buses in the wee small hours and travel hundreds of miles to get their Celebrex ..." I can hear the local newsies now. We're getting used to Americans helping themselves to whatever Canada had that they've killed off (wildlife), run out of (water) or can't afford due to the power of drug companies.

Tonight should be a blast.

Debate RULES!

I have to say, I'm starting to appreciate debate coaches of my youth. This week's New Yorker features amusing "2004 Presidential Debate Rules (fine print)" including:

At no time during the debates shall either candidate remove any article of clothing, such as tie, belt, socks, suspenders, etc. [...] Once a debate is concluded, candidates shall be permitted to toss articles of clothing, excepting underwear, into the audience for keepsake purposes.

Candidates shall address each other in terms of mutual respect (“Mr. President,” “Senator,” etc.). Use of endearing modifiers (“my distinguished opponent,” “the honorable gentleman,” “Pookie,” “Diddums,” etc.) is permitted. The following terms are specifically forbidden and may not be used until after each debate is formally concluded: “girlie-man,” “draft dodger,” “drunk,” “ignoramus,” “Jesus freak,” “frog,” “bozo,” “wimp,” “toad,” “lickspittle,” “rat bastard,” “polluting bastard,” “lying bastard,” “demon spawn,” “archfiend,” or compound nouns ending in “-hole” or “-ucker.”

(That one's for Cheney.)

Metrosexual is so last spring

but apparently that's news to FOX, who posted

a made-up news article on its Web site that quoted Mr. Kerry as gloating about his fine manicure and his "metrosexual" appearance.

They withdrew the article and apologized, saying:

that the article "was written in jest and should not have been posted or broadcast.'' It said, "We regret the error, which occurred because of fatigue and bad judgment, not malice." [...]"This was a stupid mistake and a lapse in judgment, and Carl [Cameron, chief political corespondent] regrets it,"

see the NYT for the complete story.

Poland, we hardly knew ye

Despite receiving considerable attention as the #3 member of the "coalition of the willing" at last week's debate:

My opponent says we didn't have any allies in this war. What's he say to Tony Blair? What's he say to Alexander Kwasniewski of Poland? [...] Well, actually, he forgot Poland.

Poland has decided to remove itself from Iraq by the end of next year. That leaves ... actually, that information isn't available on the White House website anymore. I'll see what I can do.