"Still sexy after all these years..."

'Jeff Gannon,' the fake reporter/wanna-be-military-escort, has closed up shop. Some people in the blogosphere are trying to blame this on supposed gay-bashing on the major left-wing blogs, triggered by the discovery of a photo of him in his underwear that he'd posted on the internet (no longer up, sorry) with the legend "Still Sexy after all these years..." Vanity afflicts people of all sexual orientations, so the photo certainly doesn't prove anything about his. So is it gay-bashing for lefties to make snide remarks implying that he is? Only if, as the right believes, being gay is something to be ashamed of. When Lynne Cheney complained about John Kerry mentioning that her daughter was gay, when Ken Mehlman puts out press releases tarring Democrats with close relationships to gay rights groups despite the open secret of his own sexual orientation, when Alan Keyes rails against gay people while his daughter posts pictures of herself making out with her girlfriend on the internet -- that is gay-bashing. Commenting on these things is not gay-bashing, it's hypocricy-bashing. Likewise, I don't care what Jeff Gannon's sexuality is, but the consumers of his fake news probably do.

The Right has beautifully turned the arguments of liberalism into rhetorical devices against liberalism itself, calling us racists for opposing Condi and Torture-guy, anti-gay for complaining about gay Republicans who push legal reforms discriminating against gays, and so on. It's stupid to fall for this trick and try to argue with them about it. To say that those who opposed an AG nominee on the grounds that he supports torture are racist because the nominee is Latino is to drain the term 'racism' of any meaning whatsoever.

But then, they're draining all language of meaning, as fast as they possibly can, so what else is new?...