They tried to take down the president in 1998, impeaching Bill Clinton for his personal behavior. They succeeded in stealing the presidency in 2000, bussing partisan street thugs in to Florida to win the p.r. campaign during the recount, and relying on the more high-brow ideologues on the Supreme Court to make it all legal. Now the hard-right smear artists and power grabbers have mounted a campaign to oust the Democratic governor of California—a largely Democratic state that George W. Bush wants in play for the 2004 elections—by installing a film star whose positions on issues are a mystery. Contrary to a media-generated image of him as 'pro gay,' for example, he has not offered a position on any gay issue. What we do know is, he's a Republican who supports this White House.
Oh, and of course, they're already saying that Arnold Schwarzenegger's own peccadilloes—which, from what you hear, make Bill Clinton look like Mother Teresa—should be completely off limits. Smearing is OK as long as you're the one doing it, right?
You have to marvel, too, at the hypocrisy, as Joe Conason sharply pointed out on Salon last week, of the rightists suddenly heralding a Hollywood celebrity for his politics after they just spent six months bludgeoning Sean Penn, Janeane Garofalo, the Dixie Chicks and assorted other liberal-leaning artists for speaking their minds. When celebrities are on the left, they're treasonous 'Hollyweirders' who should shut up and stay out of the politics. But when they're on the right, they're the kind of 'outsiders' who can do the job.
Gov. Gray Davis wasn't the only one the sleaze traffickers were set on destroying. A drama played out regarding the 11th-hour charges of 'touching' and a 'connection' to 'sex sites' against the Rev. Canon Gene Robinson, the new, openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church. The fact that the charges surfaced minutes before the bishops were to vote on confirming Robinson as a bishop was enough to give off the whiff of a smear campaign. But throw in the identity of who broke the non-story and what his connections are, and the stench becomes totally unbearable.
The nasty business began Aug. 4. As it happened, that afternoon on my radio program I was interviewing Diane Knippers, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, an orthodox Christian group. The IRD stands against 'radical forms of feminism, environmentalism, pacifism, multi-culturalism, revolutionary socialism, [and] sexual liberation,' and includes a subgroup, Episcopal Action, that opposes gay unions and was fiercely opposed to having Robinson become a bishop. Shortly after our spirited exchange, the vote on Robinson's fate was postponed, because the charge had surfaced that a gay-youth group he had worked with had links from its Web site to porn, and, in a separate charge, that a man claimed Robinson inappropriately touched him.
Still on the air, I did a search and found that the source in the media that 'broke' the 'sex site' story was Fred Barnes in the conservative Weekly Standard, on its Web site. (Barnes is also a Fox News commentator, which explains why Fox seemed to be breaking it first on TV.) In researching Knippers, I'd noticed how Barnes had been named to the board of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, which made his dubious hit on Robinson not only unseemly but a conflict of interest, to say the least.
The vote was postponed. But a day later, the bishops completed their investigation into the charges, dismissing them outright. The conclusions: Robinson hadn't been involved in the youth group for years; the links from the group weren't direct but rather were several clicks removed from porn and the 'touching,' claimed in an e-mail from an adult male parishioner to one of the bishops, amounted to Robinson having touched the guy's forearm and his back—something that, as the White House Web site shows, our president has done to just about every foreign leader he's met. (W even grabbed Ariel Sharon—heavens to Betsy!—on the knee.)
Exactly who put the 'touching' guy up to his dirty work isn't clear (he later said he'd not really meant for his charges to become public). But it turns out that the smear about the link to 'porn sites' was apparently shopped around to other news outlets, including CNN. Nobody ran with it because there was nothing there. The non-story only had legs after Fred Barnes finally wrote it up and Fox picked it up.
It's curious that the orthodox group on whose board Barnes sits, the Institute for Religion and Democracy, is bankrolled by Richard Mellon Scaife and others who funded the smears about the Clintons. I talked about Barnes' connection to the group on my program, and it was reported on a few Web sites —pushed by the blogger Atrios—but the only mainstream media outlet to pick it up, as far as I can tell, was the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which connected all the dots in a stinging editorial, 'The Anatomy of Smear.'
'So we come full circle,' the editors wrote, covering the events that impacted the Episcopal bishops' convention, which was taking place in their city. 'Gene Robinson, meet Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky. But there is a difference: In Clinton's case, years of digging eventually produced evidence of private sexual misbehavior. Robinson appears guilty of nothing at all—save being a gay man who wants to be a bishop. For some, unfortunately, that is enough to justify all sorts of innuendo and dirty tricks. Be warned: This is the way they play.'
Straights and Sinners
Calling Condoleezza Rice 'fabulous' is twisted enough, but when George W. Bush, in his Rose Garden press conference, labeled everyone 'sinners,' all I could think was: Speak for yourself. He and Condi and Rummy and Colin and Dick and Wolfie and the rest of the gang (including freaky little Poindexter), after all, may well have committed the gravest of sins: lying and distorting facts so as to invade a country, killing thousands of people in the process, including increasing numbers of American service people. Ain't nothing 'fabulous' about that.
The reporter who elicited the 'sinners' line seemed like a religious-right plant, asking Bush for his moral views on homosexuality. Our pious president then spewed a series of well-rehearsed statements, first noting that he's 'mindful that we're all sinners' and then cautioning 'those who may try to take the speck out of their neighbor's eye when they got a log in their own.' Then came this feel-good, throwaway line: 'I think it's very important for our society to respect each individual, to welcome those with good hearts, to be a welcoming country.'
As welcome as we might be, however, Bush nonetheless went on to explain that he had White House lawyers looking into ways to legally discriminate against gays so as to protect the 'sanctity' of marriage. The entire affair was interpreted oddly in much of the so-called liberal media, which is not a very good sign for things to come. The New York Times, in a mind-boggling editorial headlined 'Playing It Safe on Gays,' actually seemed to think Bush was exercising tolerance. Suckered completely, the editors called Bush's statements a 'careful attempt to brush back ... bigotry,' though they wished that he'd 'been just a tiny bit braver' and not come out against same-sex marriage. Gee, sort of like how Joe McCarthy should have been a tiny bit braver and not actually blacklisted people for his own political ends?
It's at critical moments like this—when you're about to be used as political football, kicked from here to kingdom come—that you realize that even your supposed friends just don't get it. On the same page, the Times editors, with clarity and vigor, zeroed in on Bush's shams regarding the other items the tepid White House press corps gently pressed him on in that press conference.
By claiming that 'we're all sinners' in response to a question about homosexuality, Bush is really telegraphing to his religious- right base: 'Homosexuality is a grave sin, but we all commit some sort of sin, even if it's not as bad as that of homosexuals. Let's let them live, even though we shouldn't treat them equally.' The proof of that lies in his contention that those who engage in the sin of homosexuality are to be banned from marriage, while the rest of the sinners are free to marry to their hearts' content. And need it be pointed out that Bush is not our spiritual leader but the president of the U.S.?
For the gay marriage debate, it doesn't bode well that much of the media is no longer fazed by the religious mumbo jumbo and the clear erosion of the separation of church and state that this administration has advanced. Bush's sudden leap into the same-sex marriage fracas can only mean one thing: It's all going pretty badly at the White House, from the continued meltdown in Iraq to the uranium lies to the sluggish economy. Bush's re-elect numbers continue to plummet, so Karl Rove now pulls out a contingency plan, aimed at changing the subject, firing up the party's base as we head into the election year, and creating a wedge issue with the Democrats. When people are desperate, they'll go to dangerous extremes, including amending the Constitution and subverting their own claimed belief in states' rights.
www.signorile.com
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