nytimes on cheney daughter fiasco
ok, i know i said i'd chill with the political stuff, but frank rich's op-ed piece for the NYTimes is good enough to merit a link. he compares the o'reilly fiasco (which so far seems more amusing than compelling, personally) to the one surrounding mary cheney (via kerry's mention of her sexual preference in the third debate). he links it to karl rove's long history of gossipy campaign strategies, as well as his need to ensure that the extreme homophobes occupying the radical fringe of the right come out to vote in two weeks (they are "rove's four million" in the blurp below). read the link, but if you're not feeling it, at least read the part about lynne cheney's public outrage, which is dead-on-perfect:
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.
i "bolded" the bold part, by the way...
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.
i "bolded" the bold part, by the way...