(no subject)
From The Nation comes this excerpt:
In the media spin world, it doesn't matter that Dick Cheney has spoken publicly about his gay daughter or that she attended the Republican convention with her girlfriend and was even shown on TV. It doesn't matter that Mary Cheney, currently managing her father's campaign office, has not only been out of the closet for a decade, she's a kind of professional gay conservative - faced with a national boycott during the 1990s due to its antigay policies, Coors hired her to spruce up its image among gay beer-drinkers. No one is asking why this grown-up woman is not speaking for herself: to reinforce the damsel-in-distress motif?
Thus are positions reversed: Kerry, the gay-friendly candidate, becomes the victimizer of innocent daughters, and Bush, who supports a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and who relies on homophobia to excite his fundamentalist base, becomes the generous protector. But if there's nothing immoral about being gay, and if Mary Cheney has herself made her sexual orientation public, what did Kerry do that was so monstrous?
The Mary Cheney gaffe is ... a blip, a nothing, a wisp that the Republican wind machine wants to whip into a tornado of hysterical outrage. And because so much of the media are frivolous and lazy, it can. The tactic doesn't work for long ... but it doesn't need to. It only needs to push the right buttons - propriety, prurience, politeness - for a few crucial days.
Every minute people are focusing on what John Kerry said about Mary Cheney is a minute they're not talking about Iraq, or Guantánamo, that swamp of injustice and torture, or the plain basic fact that Bush, who lost the popular vote, has used his four years in the White House to turn the country over to lobbyists, ideologues and charlatans.
It's a minute they're looking at Kerry's character and not at Bush's. It means they're not demanding action on the mushrooming scandal of pro-Bush vote suppression and fraud, and not just in Florida either - the intimidation of black voters, the trashing of Democratic registration forms by GOP-contracted firms and their rejection by state authorities on flimsy pretexts, those paperless electronic voting machines.
Defending Mary Cheney lets Republicans look concerned for a gay person while preserving their basic homophobic agenda.
But then ... this is a man who will say or do anything to further his career.
Read the whole commentary.