Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Palpable Discomfort

Andrew Sullivan | The Daily Dish: Bush on "Brokeback"

Andrew Sullivan (in his new space at Time) links to video of Bush being asked, yesterday, whether he's seen Brokeback Mountain. This is not a man comfortable talking about gay men. Why the public thought it was worse that Kerry considered it no big deal to talk about a lesbian is still beyond me.
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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Come on Richard, you are smarted than that. Playing stupid on this one doesn't win points. It wasn't that Kerry talked about a lesbian, the public doesn't really care, it's how he did it, when he did it and who he did it about. It was all circumstance. If he talked about another homosexual that didn't happen to be related to his opponent over and over again, it would have made a nice point, but he didn't, hence the slight misstep. (I don't think it cost him Ohio)

Tuesday, January 24, 2006 at 10:41:00 PM CST
Richard said...

Come on, Gerken--you're not that easily duped by the Cheneys, are you? What they did to their daughter during the campaign was shameful. They'd trot her--and her partner!--out for one photo op, letting people think, "Oh, see, the Republicans are really tolerant after all. They let Mary bring her girlfriend to the convention." Then they'd leave both of them out of the next photo op. They used her as a political pawn, and they knew exactly what they were doing. They practically dared Kerry and Edwards to bring it up.

Kerry's mistake wasn't bringing Mary Cheney up in the debate, it was failing to call Bush and Cheney out on the carpet for their hypocrisy on gay issues. He couldn't ask how they could say they love Mary and say in the same breath that they don't think she should be allowed to get married because his own position was so damned incoherent. So he walked into the spectacle of Lynne calling him a bad man and acting like the wounded mother, when if she was wounded by hearing her daughter called a lesbian when she already knows it to be true and claims to be accepting, she's just a bad mother.

This disconnect between what he should have been able to say and what he did say is why, when Democrats call me asking me to give more money so we can win in '06, I tell them no. And not just no: I tell them that they won't get another dime from me until they support full equality for gays and lesbians. Anything less and they're just pandering to us for our votes and our money, then ignoring us when they win.

Don't worry, though: The fact that I refuse to give them money won't stop me from voting for them. We can still cancel out one another's votes, Gerken.

Wednesday, January 25, 2006 at 10:38:00 AM CST
Anonymous said...

Touche

Wednesday, January 25, 2006 at 3:21:00 PM CST

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