Sanctity of Marriage Watch

Why is one not exactly gob-smacked to find that a leading Republican Christianist was once a client of the DC Madam? I mean, a leading evangelical opponent of gay equality, Ted Haggard, was hiring a male hooker. We had the leading Republican campaigner against hooking up with minors online … hassling adolescent pages with IMs. We had Newt Gingrich committing adultery while impeaching Clinton. Why should we expect anything different from senator David Vitter? All the usual signs of hooker-use are in the record:

A staunch conservative, Vitter disavowed same-sex unions during his 2004 campaign, boasting that he had co-authored and fought for the Federal Marriage Amendment. He further vowed to protect "the sanctity of marriage."

"This is a real outrage. The Hollywood left is redefining the most basic institution in human history, and our two U.S. senators won’t do anything about it," he said in a statement on his campaign Web site. "We need a U.S. senator who will stand up for Louisiana values, not Massachusetts values."

Massachusetts has a lower divorce rate than Louisiana. Maybe that explains Senator Vitter hiring a whore.

Bill Richardson Pulls a Coulter

He called another man on the Imus show – yes, the Imus show – a faggot. It took Richardson a year to apologize. And it was in Spanish:

Almost exactly one year before Imus was to lose his show for using a slur to describe the Rutger’s women’s basketball team, the shock jock used the Spanish word “maricón” in an on-air exchange with Richardson.

“Bernard on the staff here has been claiming you’re not really Hispanic so– that you’re just claiming that for some sort of advantage or something,” Imus said to Richardson, tongue clearly in cheek. “You can just answer this yes or no and this will answer that question. Would you agree that Bernard is a maricón?”

Without missing a beat, Richardson replied in Spanish, “Yo creo que Bernardo, sí — es un maricón si él piensa que yo no soy hispano. [General laughter] Was that good enough or what? [General laughter]”

"That’s good enough for me," Imus replied.

Most gay Latinos interviewed for this story agreed with the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation that the word "maricón" means “faggot” in Spanish. So, translated to English, Richardson had replied: "I believe that Bernard, yes – he’s a faggot if he thinks that I am not Hispanic."

The gay groups decided not to make an issue of it at the time – because he’s a Democrat. Sigh.

“Panic”

One of the now recurrent memes on the dead-ender right is the conflation of all opposing arguments on the war as "hysteria," "insanity" or "panic." Thus, NRO decribes those Republican lawmakers worried about the Bush administration breaking the US military for political cover as merely concerned about their own re-election or simply prone to panic. Thus Bill Kristol describes those who disagree with the current conduct of a war as "insane" and "irrational." Critics of the worst president since Carter are literally "deranged." Well, of course we are, aren’t we? No sane person could possibly conclude that the last four years in Iraq have been a disaster, could they?

There, of course, is nothing panicky at all about trying to foresee major problems next spring when the military reaches a final breaking point and we have no strategy for drawdown. It is something called prudence, a virtue apparently conflated with cowardice in the fevered guts of Cheney and Bush. It is panicky to shriek assertions that the surge is working (when the evidence just isn’t there), that we need no other strategy in the foreseeable future, that the benchmarks we were promised as objective criteria for assessing the surge’s success are now irrelevant, and so on. The American people are neither stupid nor cowards. Their patience with this war has been astonishing. They have endured it for almost as long as the Second World War, spent billions of their own money on it, lost over 3,000 lives and tens of thousands of serious casualties, re-elected the president who waged it, and have provided him with any resources he asked for. It is not panicky at the end of four years of that, when the situation is clearly worse than the day after we invaded, when we have presided over a moral and strategic catastrophe, and when we are becoming a pawn in an ancient sectarian civil war that has no foreseeable end, that we decide to cut our losses and move to less maximal goals.

Richard Lugar, moreover, is a very difficult man to describe as an hysteric. Domenici likewise. That the neocon chorus is now attacking these pillars of the Republican establishment is a sign of neocon panic, and no one else’s. Their day is over. Someone else’s is about to begin. But like all fanatics, they will not go easily.

Byron York on the Pardons Of Scooter Libby and Susan McDougal

Libbymarkwilsongetty

The often-excellent reporter Byron York has opined that only a full pardon would have made sense for the felon Irving Libby. Here’s his argument:

President Bush came up with a cramped, limited statement, commuting Libby’s jail term while keeping (at least for now) his conviction, a $250,000 fine that he has already paid and two years of probation. One didn’t have to read too far between the lines to guess that the president believes Libby to be guilty of perjury; just for good measure, Bush threw in some good words for Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald. The problem, the president said, wasn’t that Fitzgerald had gone on a three-year fishing expedition that netted only Libby, or that the Iraq war’s foes were using the CIA leak case to rehash their grievances against the original decision to invade; rather, the problem was simply that U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton’s sentence was "excessive." "We specifically don’t want an executive to re-try a case and decide he knows better than the judge or jury," says Vin Weber, a sometime White House adviser. "We want the executive to take a broader national interest into account — something that needs to be taken into account that a judge or jury couldn’t properly take into account."

In other words, if Bush had pardoned Libby because the CIA leak probe never should have happened, fine. But don’t play judge, Mr. President — that’s not your branch.

The reason for a pardon was that the case was political, should never have been brought and deserved presidential contempt for its sentence. Now here is how York saw the Clinton pardon of Susan McDougal in 2001, a woman who had already served three months for one Whitewater charge and then eighteen months in jail for refusing to talk further. It makes for a fascinating contrast:

There has been speculation for years that Clinton would pardon McDougal – but it didn’t come until the morning of January 20, just two hours before Clinton left office. The next day, the new ex-president, explaining his decisions in several controversial cases, told reporters, "You’re not saying that these people didn’t commit the offense. You’re saying they paid, they paid in full, and they’ve been out long enough after their sentence to show they’re good citizens, so they ought to have a chance to get full citizenship."

How that applies to McDougal is not entirely clear. Yes, she paid a price-three and a half months in jail for Whitewater, and 18 months for refusing to talk. But she has never admitted any wrongdoing, never expressed any remorse, and never stopped condemning the prosecutors who tried her case. Marc Rich showed a certain amount of respect for the law by running away from it. Susan McDougal chose to stay home and thumb her nose.

But Libby, just like McDougal, has admitted no wrongdoing, and showed contempt for the justice system by lying under oath. But strikingly unlike McDougal, he has served no time, and never will. But it’s okay to give him a total pardon, but not ok for Clinton to do so in far clearer case. Clear now?

(Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty.)