Of course you remember Presidential Debate #3, don't you? Where we heard John Kerry say this?
We’re all God’s children, Bob. 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 a choice.
And you remember Lynn Cheney (author of a racy book) on CNN shortly thereafter?
"I am speaking as a mom and a pretty indignant mom. This is not a good man. What a cheap and tawdry political trick."
Then there was Darth Vader himself the next day, calling himself "a pretty angry father" and deriding Senator Kerry as well. Sister Liz Cheney went on the news to register her apparent shock and horror that anyone would suggest that Mary C. is a lesbian.
At the time, the Democrats were somewhat caught off guard. What John Kerry had said seemed mundane and if it raised any eyebrows on the left, it was because Kerry's comments in this regard can't truly be reconciled with his anti-marriage position. We dismissed the Republican outrage as completely manufactured. Of course, the press didn't help out either. As fair.org points out, Kerry's comments were replayed 263 times, while Bush's flat-out lie that he never said he wasn't worried about Osama bin Laden was only replayed 112 times.
Fast forward to last week.
Barbara Boxer to Condoleezza Rice:
Who pays the price? I'm not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old, and my grandchild is too young. You're not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with an immediate family."
Well, the nerve of the woman to suggest that neither of them were paying a price for the war. Right wing blogs everywhere suggested that Boxer was saying that Rice wasn't qualified because she had no family! Of course, her comments were hardly noticed initially by those on the Democratic side. The San Francisco Chronicle even proudly printed her comments alongside those of other Senators. Eventually, the talking heads were expressing their rage:
Rice herself started things off:
Gee, I thought single women had come further than that.
Rush Limbaugh
Here you have a rich white chick with a huge, big mouth, trying to lynch this, an African-American woman, right before Martin Luther King Day, hitting below the ovaries here.
Tony Snow
I don’t know if she [Senator Boxer] was being intentionally tacky. It’s a great leap backward for feminism.
[aside: as though Republicans had ever cared about feminism, dickwad.]
And then there's Tony Blankley, whom I've never seen so outraged, about anything, ever, on the McLaughlin Group screaming that Boxer was way out of line. His eyes almost popped out of his fat little head.
I believe that we have been far too generous to the Republicans in dismissing this as "just politics," or fake outrage. To a certain extent it is, but Republicans have revealed an awful lot about themselves during these two episodes.
First, consider that it likely never even occurred to Kerry or Boxer that they could score political points by pointing out that that Mary Cheney is a lesbian or that Condoleezza Rice is a single woman. Kerry, for his part, was pandering to the LEFT, trying to point out that he wasn't such a bad guy, even though he was eventually going to go home and advocate against gay marriage in Massachusetts. Boxer was also clearly thinking only about two classes of people: those who have children in Iraq and those who don't. Her comments were meant to evoke feelings of empathy for those in Rice, implying that if it is possible for Boxer, then it should be for Rice.
Of course, lost in the discussion to this point is that the only way it could even occur to Republicans to try and turn these comments to their advantage the way they did is if they are ashamed of Cheney and Rice (or feel that a good part of their constituency does). Republicans actually must feel ashamed for the Cheneys and Mary Cheney....and more surprisingly, they must feel that there is shame in being a single woman.
A classic case of projection, if you ask me. Again.