Bruce Garrett Cartoon
The Cartoon Gallery

A Coming Out Story
A Coming Out Story

My Photo Galleries
New and Improved!

Past Web Logs
The Story So Far archives

My Amazon.Com Wish List

My Myspace Profile

Bruce Garrett's Profile
Bruce Garrett's Facebook profile


Blogs I Read!
Alicublog

Wayne Besen

Beyond Ex-Gay
(A Survivor's Community)

Box Turtle Bulletin

Chrome Tuna

Daily Kos

Mike Daisy's Blog

The Disney Blog

Envisioning The American Dream

Eschaton

Ex-Gay Watch

Hullabaloo

Joe. My. God

Peterson Toscano

Progress City USA

Slacktivist

SLOG

Fear the wrath of Sparky!

Wil Wheaton



Gone But Not Forgotten

The Rittenhouse Review

Steve Gilliard's News Blog

Steve Gilliard's Blogspot Site



Great Cartoon Sites!

Howard Cruse Central

Tripping Over You
Tripping Over You

XKCD

Commando Cody Monthly

Scandinavia And The World

Dope Rider

The World Of Kirk Anderson

Ann Telnaes' Cartoon Site

Bors Blog

John K

Penny Arcade




Other News & Commentary

Lead Stories

Amtrak In The Heartland

Corridor Capital

Railway Age

Maryland Weather Blog

Foot's Forecast

All Facts & Opinions

Baltimore Crime

Cursor

HinesSight

Page One Q
(GLBT News)


Michelangelo Signorile

The Smirking Chimp

Talking Points Memo

Truth Wins Out

The Raw Story

Slashdot




International News & Views

BBC

NIS News Bulletin (Dutch)

Mexico Daily

The Local (Sweden)




News & Views from Germany

Spiegel Online

The Local

Deutsche Welle

Young Germany




Fun Stuff

It's not news. It's FARK

Plan 59

Pleasant Family Shopping

Discount Stores of the 60s

Retrospace

Photos of the Forgotten

Boom-Pop!

Comics With Problems

HMK Mystery Streams




Mercedes Love!

Mercedes-Benz USA

Mercedes-Benz TV

Mercedes-Benz Owners Club of America

MBCA - Greater Washington Section

BenzInsider

Mercedes-Benz Blog

BenzWorld Forum

August 28th, 2007

We’re The Moral Values Party…The Party Is The Moral Value…

Glen Greenwald has a good post up about the somewhat different reactions from the kook pews to Larry Craig’s first outing, verses his second…

The reaction to the Larry Craig story provides one of the most vivid illustrations yet of how the right-wing movement works. Last October, just weeks before the midterm election, gay activist Mike Rogers reported that the married, GOP "family values" Senator repeatedly had sex with anonymous men in public bathrooms. His report was based on "extensive research," including interviews with several men whom Craig solicited for bathroom sex.

As Rogers argued at the time, the story was relevant — just as the Vitter prostitute story was — in light of Craig’s frequent political exploitation of issues of sexual morality and his opposition to virtually every gay rights bill. Rogers’ story, as a factual matter, seemed relatively credible, both because of his history of accurate outings and because there is no discernible reason why, if he were intent on fabricating, he would single out someone as obscure as Larry Craig, who was not even up for re-election.

Nonetheless, it is hard to overstate the intense fury that this pre-election report triggered from the Right — not at Senator Craig for engaging in this behavior, but at Rogers for reporting it.

The "Then" and "Now" examples Greenwald gives make it sickeningly clear that the problem for the Party Of Moral Values was the election, and not Craig’s behavior.

Last year, in excoriating Mike Rogers for reporting about Craig’s bathroom sex, Dean Barnett said:

I’m sorry if this topic causes embarrassment to Larry Craig and his family, but I assume by now they’ve figured out that politics in 2006 is a thoroughly rotten business. . . .

THE FIRST LEFT WING PATHOLOGY "OUTED" by the Craig story is the relentless meanness that characterizes modern day liberalism. . . .BUT MOST DAMNING OF THE LEFT is the casual assumption of group-think that this exercise demonstrates. The logic is that if you’re gay, you must therefore support gay marriage. What’s more, you must support everything that someone like Glenn Greenwald supports. To do otherwise evidences self-hatred and a betrayal of the cause.

But today, Barnett — based on reports of the exact same behavior from Craig — demanded that Craig resign from the Senate and said this:

AS TO THE SERIOUS QUESTION OF whether or not Senator Craig should resign, that one’s a no-brainer for someone like me who thought David Vitter should have stepped down. To lead millions of people, one needs at least a modicum of moral stature. Both politicians forfeited that stature when they engaged in their off-campus hijinks . . . .

Vitter falls into the same category. You can’t preen as a moralist and then seek out the services of a prostitute. If Vitter (or Craig or Clinton) had positioned themselves as libertarian libertines, then their private diddlings would have been none of our concern. But all three made a habit of saluting good old All-American family values. How a ranking public office-holder can be so thoroughly revealed as a hypocrite and still cling to his position is beyond me.

I would honestly pay money to watch someone try to reconcile those two positions. Last October, Barnett depicted Rogers as an "odious presence" for violating Craig’s privacy based on purely private behavior that was none of anyone’s business. Today, the same Barnett demands that Craig resign from the Senate, and invokes exactly the rationale which Rogers and other "outers" use to justify these disclosures ("How a ranking public office-holder can be so thoroughly revealed as a hypocrite and still cling to his position is beyond me").

Finally, and rather hilariously, Barnett defends Hewitt’s demand that Craig resign but Vitter need not as follows: "Where one draws the line on such matters is arbitrary, so I don’t think anyone’s being hypocritical if they say Vitter can stay and Craig must go."

Apparently, what matters is to have moral standards, even if they are completely incoherent, arbitrary and applied solely to suit one’s personal biases and political interests [Vitter’s resignation would be for heterosexual encounters and would lead to appointment of a Democratic replacement (hence Hewitt opposes it), while Craig’s resignation would be for gay sex and would lead to a GOP replacement (hence Hewitt favors it)]. It might be totally "arbitrary," says Barnett, but at least it is a moral standard.

Right.  As Garrison Keillor said after the 2000 "election" of President Nice Job Brownie, they’re republicans first, and Americans second.  What benefits The Party is morally right, because it benefits The Party.  That’s the standard.  Everything else from God to Abortion to Same Sex Marriage is just a hook to get the rubes into the voting booths.  They don’t give a good goddamn about any of that.  They just want power.

Leave a Reply

Visit The Woodward Class of '72 Reunion Website For Fun And Memories, WoodwardClassOf72.com


What I'm Currently Reading...




What I'm Currently Watching...




What I'm Currently Listening To...




Comic Book I've Read Recently...



web
stats

This page and all original content copyright © 2022 by Bruce Garrett. All rights reserved. Send questions, comments and hysterical outbursts to: bruce@brucegarrett.com

This blog is powered by WordPress and is hosted at Winters Web Works, who also did some custom design work (Thanks!). Some embedded content was created with the help of The Gimp. I proof with Google Chrome on either Windows, Linux or MacOS depending on which machine I happen to be running at the time.