Truespeak

Up to this point, I've avoided posting about the Jeff Gannon/J.D. Guckert affair because I really didn't have anything more to add to the discourse. SusanG and the rest at DailyKos did such an outstanding job of researching and reporting on things that there was really nothing more for me to add. But leave it to the mainstream media to fuck it all up. According to them, it's all about Gannon/Guckert's sex life, which taken by itself is quite a story. But what this is really about goes far beyond private lives and gay escorts. Sure, there's sex involved and in today's world nothing sells like sex. And if it's a sex scandal, well that's even better. But sex is only part of this issue. This whole thing goes right to the heart of what is wrong with our nation today. It's about hypocrisy.

Since John at AMERICAblog got all this sex stuff started, I'll let him address the issue of hypocrisy first:

[Referring to Hotline, a big inside-the-beltway publication read by all]

Where was the high-and-mighty Hotline when George Bush, with the help of buddies like Guckert, tried to write me and 20 million of my friends out of the Constitution last year? Where was Accuracy in Media, the conservative bloggers, and everyone else who is defending Guckert's "private life" when my private life was going to singled out and savaged in our nation's most sacred document simply to get a few votes?

You've got a lot of nerve, Hotline. The entire GOP and its mainstream media sympathizers have a lot of nerve. We're talking about a hooker getting special access to the White House, the president, and intelligence information, and somehow everyone has suddenly discovered a conscience about homosexuals and hookers. Oh how I wish that conscience were real. But it's not. Bash a fag, bash a whore, and the GOP eats it all up. They throw us to their hateful, bigoted religious right buddies for votes with glee, while Mary Cheney cowers in the corner and Ken Mehlman runs for the shelter of the off-the-record quote.

Well newsflash Washington. The GOP is the one that rose gay-bashing and gay-baiting and sex-baiting to an art, and JeffJimGuckertGannon willingly joined the family values parade in print and in passion. They're trying to ban condoms, pornography, AIDS education. They take children away from gays, and want to make our very lives a crime. GOP Senators compare us to kleptomaniacs, alcoholics, and man-dog sex. And they can't even handle a bronze breast on a statue.

And we're the ones picking a fight over sex.

Spare me your sanctimonious bullshit now that those of us in the gay community and on the left have finally - finally - started to fight fire with fire by simply holding you to the very standards you legislate over us. We are simply giving the GOP the sex-less utopia it's always wanted. How does it feel?

Oh, gee, the Hotline warns, this might establish a precedent. Really? You mean the GOP might respond by using our sex lives against us as a weapon to destroy us and curry votes with bigots?

And just in case that wasn't direct enough for you, Digby makes his point very clear:

We have a man whose biggest cheers on the campaign trail in 2000 were when he would solemnly swear that he would "bring honor and integrity back to the White House" --- and everybody knew very well that he was talking about fellatio in the oval office. After his recent reelection in 2004, stories abounded about how the issues of moral values, the impact of evangelical Christians and, most importantly, the movement to allow gays to marry had tipped the balance in what was a very close election. Now we find out that a conservative gay male prostitute was given highly unusual access to that same family values white house. There isn't a story there?

For too long, this has been ignored. This was the administration that was going to "restore dignity" to the White House. And then they gave us shit like WMDs in Iraq, Saddam loves bin Laden, Abu Ghraib, Uranium from Niger, Valerie Plame, the Patriot Act, Gitmo, Freedom Fries, Ahmed Chalabi, and endless whoring of the 9/11 victims. Just to name a few. Yet they continue to stand atop their mountain of bullshit morals and look down their noses at anyone who would dare to question their motives. During this administration's tenure, the rich have become richer while the poor have become poorer. We've seen more Americans fall below the poverty level, more children living without health care, more seniors unable to afford their prescription medication, and still more tax cuts to favor the wealthy. We've seen ballooning budget deficits that aren't important and fake social security crisis caused by deficits that are too important to ignore. We've seen war heroes ridiculed and now we've seen whores given access to the White House briefing room and, according to his own words, access to secret intelligence memos.

Is this dignity? Is this integrity? No, this is hypocrisy. Plain, simple, straight forward hypocrisy. The party of moral values has none. The Emperor truly has no clothes.