Shocked, Shocked

During Wednesday night's debate, when asked if "homosexuality is a choice," President Bush replied by once again supporting a constitutional amendment preventing gays from marrying and somehow threatening the marriages of everyone else.

When it was his turn, John Kerry mentioned that Dick Cheney's daughter is gay: "We're all God's children...and I think if you were to talk to Dick Cheney's daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she's being who she was, she's being who she was born as. I think if you talk to anybody, it's not choice."

Now, everyone knows Mary Cheney is gay. Not only is this not a secret, but it's been quite openly discussed this year, by her father among others. But you'd never guess it from Republican reaction. The White House and the Bush campaign (which are, let's face it, one and the same), acted like Kerry had "outed" her. Either that, or he had said he wanted to see her doing the Midnight Lesbo Show at a local strip joint.

"Now, I did have a chance to assess John Kerry once more," Lynne Cheney said after the debate, "and the only thing I could conclude is this is not a good man. This is not a good man. And of course, I am speaking as a mom and a pretty indignant mom. This is not a good man -- what a cheap and tawdry political trick." The sense of outrage was finely tuned, and was flogged by the GOP's media allies from Rush Limbaugh to Fox News as a "smear."

Unfortunately for the Republicans, their outrage was as false as it was palpable. I don't recall hearing any such flatulence from the right when GOP pundit and Illinois senatorial candidate Alan Keyes said a few weeks back that the VP's daughter was a sinner who practiced "selfish hedonism." Nor were the Cheneys up in arms when Congressional Republicans took to the House and Senate floor earlier this year to flog the anti-gay-marriage amendment, trying to deny gay and lesbian Americans first-class citizenship by denying them the same marriage rights the rest of us take for granted. Or when Republican candidates even now use the issue as a political wedge to bash their Democratic opponents. They even remained silent when the Bush Administration announced it would ignore the Clinton Administration's addition of sexual orientation to the federal government's anti-discrimination rules.

John Kerry said Dick Cheney's daughter is gay. Horrors! Doesn't he realize that Mary Cheney is solely the Republicans' to exploit, and he is not allowed to horn in on their act? Another interpretation is that the Bush campaign was playing to its evangelical Christian base by pretending that being gay is terrible and shameful, and referring to an openly gay person as being gay is a horrible insult, one which must be repudiated loudly and repeatedly.

The GOP's outrage over this fake "smear" is so blatantly phony as to make P.T. Barnum cringe. Then again, since they have no real accomplishments to tout, they've got to run on something. After all, a manufactured incident is better than nothing at all.