Republicans are angry that the Jeff Gannon/Jim Guckert story won’t go away. Guckert, of course, is the now-infamous White House correspondent, the go-to guy for softball questions, who turns out to have been a serial plagiarist and a gay prostitute. He wrote under the pseudonym Jeff Gannon for a website call gopusa.com, clearly an advocacy site for the Republican Party.
Now his stories have been stripped from the website, and he is giving interviews, complaining to CNN’s Anderson Cooper that “the effect of this has been that we seem to have established a new standard for journalists in this country, where if someone disagrees with you, then your personal life, your private life, and anything you have ever done in the past is going to be brought up for public inspection.”
First of all, that standard is nothing new; it’s been in full effect since the Clinton era at least. Second, Guckert is exactly the kind of weasel who would jump on a story like this if it involved a Democrat.
But Guckert is not alone in defending his largely indefensible position. While most conservative columnists, along with the top newspapers in the country are simply not addressing the story, hordes of Republican bloggers, who usually wouldn’t touch a gay man with tongs, let alone defend his reputation, are protesting that the left has gone too far, that Gannon’s private life is off-limits, and, amazingly, accusing those keeping the story alive to be homophobes. The hypocrisy is jaw-dropping.
The people who are driving the Gannon/Guckert story are not homophobic. Most of them probably think prostitution should be legal. But Guckert’s homosexuality and promiscuity are absolutely fair game, because they indicate a fundamentally flawed personal philosophy.
It’s silly enough for Republicans to accuse anyone of hypocrisy while they are defending a homosexual, but these people are simply missing the point. To say his sexual orientation is an irrelevant issue is ridiculous. It is extremely relevant, if only as a reference to his astounding hypocrisy. If David Duke turned out to be a Jew, it would be newsworthy, and no one would call those who reported it anti-Semitic.
Guckert wrote often about John Kerry's “pro-homosexual platform” in the runup to the election. One of his stories was titled, "Kerry Could Become First Gay President." These stories, needless to say, were not positive, but designed to scare and anger homophobes, to fan the flames of their dumb hatred. He espoused the imagined moral superiority of his party and pandered to, all while he was cornholing rich businessmen for $200 and hour. That isn’t relevant? Ridiculous.
What’s really got the Republicans’ panties twisted is that Guckert’s story is an uncomfortable reminder of their own inner conflicts, a crack in the wall of denial they’ve built in their minds to separate the standards by which they judge others from the realities of their own personal behavior.
Another recent example of this comes in the form of a snippet of tape, a clandestine recording of a private phone conversation between President Bush and Doug Wead, former special assistant to the first President Bush, wherein Bush clearly implies having used cocaine and pot, explaining that he wouldn’t admit it publicly, “…‘cause I don't want some little kid doing what I tried.”
The revelation is hardly a shocker. Everyone on both sides has long known that Bush was into his chemicals back when he was just a young middle-aged man, whether they acknowledged it or not. But what it epitomizes is the uncanny ability of conservatives to pride themselves in dishonesty and double standards. Bush’s logic is so twisted he even finds fault in Al Gore’s admission that he had tried reefer back in college.
Worse than that is, again, the hypocrisy of it: Bush doesn’t have any qualms about putting millions of non-violent offenders in prison for significant fractions of their lives for doing less than what he won’t acknowledge, but tacitly admits, he himself has done.
It is a paradox in the heart of every fire-and-brimstone preacher, every holier-than-thou pundit, every politician who campaigns primarily on “moral values.” Their standards apply to everyone but themselves. The moral values crowd is replete with immoral cretins, child molesters, rapists, murderers, thieves, and prostitutes, and they are usually the ones who shout loudest.
This denial is a pervasive element of the Republican agenda, and extends to policy: recent cabinet appointments are clearly designed to keep the lid on any information that the neocons don’t want us to hear, or just don’t want to hear themselves. The best examples of this are John Negroponte, who will be in charge of intelligence, and still denies the existence of death squads during his stay in Honduras, and stealth appointee Allan Weinstein, a dubious conservative “historian” who is now in charge of the National Archives, and will do everything in his considerable power to stop or delay the release of any records from this administration all the way back to Nixon’s.
Secrecy and denial are as much essential components of Bush’s White House as they are of a closet homosexual’s lifestyle. Penetrate the mirage, reveal the lie, and people get angry. Right-wingers are mad because, in essence, Guckert is Bush—a talentless pretender firing a cannon in a glass house.
I’m not saying you can’t be a gay Republican. I’m saying you can’t be a gay Republican and make any sense. It’s one thing to believe in smaller government and free markets, but to choose to support a party that explicitly finds you repugnant as a human being beggars the imagination.
It is this enhanced capacity for denial and hypocrisy that the Bush administration is relying on to get the job done. While they have spared no effort in preventing incriminating evidence from ever seeing daylight, this voluntary idiocy is their ace in the hole, ensuring that the inevitable drips and drabs of evidence (a little torture here, some malfeasance there) will in the end not be enough to topple them. Along with a complicit GOP-dominated congress and a court system stacked with collaborators, these factors combine to make the Bush White House a totally unbeatable force, and leaves Democrats in the unenviable role of playing the eternal loser Washington Generals to The Republican’s Harlem Globetrotters. At this point, “Hannity and Colmes” is an accurate portrayal of the political debate in this country! and the power balance in our government.
Those of us outside the cult who are masochistic enough to keep paying attention are horrified, watching our country’s future go to pieces and powerless to do anything about it. It’s like watching someone kill your parents on closed circuit TV in a jail cell—frustration and horror in the extreme.
Jim Guckert, a liar, fraud and prostitute, is a perfect human embodiment of the modern Republican. And that is why they are so desperate for him to go away.
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