Issues

by digby

I could not care less if Condi Rice is gay and is in a long term relationship. But I also don’t think it’s surprising that people would publicly speculate about it considering the history of the man she works for:

It’s Texas, 1994, and Karl Rove is running George W. Bush’s campaign against Gov. Ann Richards. Bush appears to be in for an uphill fight against a popular incumbent, but then the whispers and the rumors start. Maybe there’s a lesbian working for Richards. Maybe she’s using state funds to visit her lover. Maybe Richards herself is gay.

“There was a lot of whispering going on in the backwater,” says Bill Cryer, a former newsman who worked as Richards’ press secretary. “I don’t think anybody ever really thought Ann Richards was gay, but somebody was trying to plant the seed.”

Bush says nothing about the rumors, but he doesn’t have to. The stories are everywhere, and one day a Bush surrogate — a state senator serving as Bush’s East Texas campaign chairman, a guy who just happens to have worked with Rove — says just enough about the rumors to get the word into the press. Richards’ appointments of “avowed homosexuals,” he tells a reporter, might be a liability in her campaign for reelection.

Just like that, the allegation is on the record, the rumors become newspaper stories, and Bush becomes governor of Texas.

I don’t think it even matters if Condi’s gay, frankly. No honorable person would have worked for Bush after that regardless of his or her sexual orientation. But you have to admit that it takes an extremely unusual person to be the best friend and confidant of a man who would do such a thing if she were gay herself.

It’s become clear in the last few years that right wingers are psychologically unfit to lead the nation. Vast numbers of them are “conservative” not due to philosophy but to cover up for serious personal issues with sexuality, masculinity, oedipal complexes and worse. In fact, it’s so pervasive that one must now assume that conservative political leaders are driven by a complicated desire to compensate for psychological problems rather than the usual political mix of ambition, ego and drive to power. There are just too many examples of disturbed, neurotic, secretive GOP hypocrites out there. It’s a feature not a bug.

.