Who Are They Kidding?

Raw Story asked people on the hill why the Democrats and the press seems so reluctant to cover the Manchurian Beefcake scandal and got some interesting rationales, none of which are the least bit believable.

First:

“The reason that people don’t want to talk about the sex angle in the story is that we all know that the mainstream media will not pick up the story,” the aide said.

The aide said reporters from varying print and television outlets expressed to him that they had felt duped after the sex scandals hyped around former President Bill Clinton.

“I think that you have a different culture with the mainstream media than you did than you did during the Clinton scandal,” he remarked. “I think in some ways that they’ve learned their lesson from that incident and many reporters feel that they were duped during that scandal into the kind of coverage that they were by the salacious nature, and I think there’s a resistance by the mainstream media to go down that road again.”

That would be the liberal media who were duped by Republicans into cruelly exposing to the entire world the sex life of a White House intern whose only crime was talking to that shrieking harpy Linda Tripp. They have learned their lesson and now feel squeamish about exposing the sex life of a gay Republican prostitute who widely advertised his services on the internet and somehow gained unprecedented access to the family values White House in spite of having no credentials whatsoever.

It’s good to know that they’ve finally got their priorities straight. Monica Lewinsky must feel awfully relieved about that.

And as far as the Democrats are concerned, I’m wondering how they can pass a drivers test if this is how fucking dumb they are:

A Democratic Senate aide noted that Republicans had lost their bid to impeach Clinton, and said that Democrats were just being careful.

“The one piece of the Clinton sex scandal that everyone always forgets is that they lost,” the aide said. “Clinton was never impeached.”

Yeah. That whole thing really worked out badly for them didn’t it? I’d sure hate to be in their shoes today!

And what I love about this is that it is utter rubbish. I don’t know how many hits Americablog got to “that post” but I would bet that it was huge and that a very significant number came from DC insiders and journalists. Please don’t tell me that they aren’t interested. Not only is it about militarystuds.com it’s about them, the press corps.

So far, they haven’t had to investigate anything. The blogs are doing that for them. This guy is an internet creation and the internet leaves trails all over the place. But every day new questions are being raised and old mysteries are being solved. Who knows where it will lead? One thing I can guarantee is that if somebody finds it they will eventually find a way to report it. That is how the Lewinsky scandal broke through, after all. They fed the news to Drudge who then broke the story so the mainstream press had a hook. Don’t kid yourselves. The rules haven’t changed. “It’s Out There” hasn’t been retired.

I’ve got a couple of questions that I haven’t seen addressed but would seem to be relevant. How was Gannon being paid? Eberle of GOPUSA stipulated that Gannon was paid a stipend equal to half of his income, according to the congressional press office. Was that true or was he actually a “volunteer” as some have stated? If so, where was he getting the other half?

And isn’t it interesting that the other main character in the White House payola scandal, Armstrong Williams, was sued by his male assistant for sexual harrassment and settled it for an undisclosed sum. (One of the sweeter aspects of that settlement was that the plaintiff was given a nice sinecure at Oliver Stone’s media outfit. Semper Fi, baby.)

It certainly does seem as if the Bush White House is pretty darned tolerant for an administration that mined millions of votes in the evangelical community by being against gay rights. And the Dems and the mainstream press know very well that this is a problem for the Republicans.

George W. Bush’s carefully crafted mystique is built entirely on his manufactured masculinity. In fact, the Republican Party has based its whole image upon the idea that they are the party of macho straight men and the fawning traditonal women who love them. They have spent the last 35 years impugning the manhood of every male Democrat and portraying every Democratic feminist as a manhating bitch — and winning the national security issue pretty much on the basis of what that implied to their bigoted neanderthal base. It never ends. Back in the day it was “I can’t tell if you’re a boy or a girl with all that hair.” Just last year they spent hundreds of millions of dollars convincing a large number of people that a documented war hero (and killer) was a mincing, vacillating “Frenchman.” What do you think that that was all about?

I’ve always believed that one of the main reasons Clinton frustrated them so much was that his womanizing protected him from the ongoing gay-baiting subtext of the Republican appeal. It took one of their most potent arrows out of the quiver. The best they could do was call Hillary a dyke.

Every time the Republicans are called upon to squeal “don’t ask don’t tell” when asked about JimJeff Gannon, it puts another hairline crack in their coalition. Don’t ever think that this does not affect them. It goes to the very essence of who they portray themselves to be.

Update: The above many be the subtext, but here’s the hook.

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