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Junkie
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Political smear campaigns and the hypocrisy of the Right
Gay Bishops, fair game. Arnold? Leave his personal life out of politics.
Hypocritical? Why yes, of course.
http://www.nypress.com/print.cfm?content_id=8715
Quote:
Being Exposed
A gay bishop is smeared, jeered, cheered.
They tried to take down the president in 1998, impeaching Bill Clinton for his personal behavior. They succeeded in stealing the presidency in 2000, bussing partisan street thugs in to Florida to win the p.r. campaign during the recount, and relying on the more high-brow ideologues on the Supreme Court to make it all legal. Now the hard-right smear artists and power grabbers have mounted a campaign to oust the Democratic governor of California—a largely Democratic state that George W. Bush wants in play for the 2004 elections—by installing a film star whose positions on issues are a mystery. Contrary to a media-generated image of him as "pro gay," he has not offered a position on any gay issue. What we do know is, he’s a Republican who supports this White House.
Oh, and of course, they’re already saying that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s own peccadilloes—which, from what you hear, make Bill Clinton look like Mother Teresa—should be completely off limits. Smearing is okay as long as you’re the one doing it, right?
You have to marvel, too, at the hypocrisy, as Joe Conason sharply pointed out on Salon last week, of the rightists suddenly heralding a Hollywood celebrity for his politics after they just spent six months bludgeoning Sean Penn, Janeane Garofalo, the Dixie Chicks and assorted other liberal-leaning artists for speaking their minds. When celebrities are on the left, they’re treasonous "Hollyweirders" who should shut up and stay out of the politics. But when they’re on the right, they’re just the kind of "outsiders" who can do the job.
Governor Gray Davis wasn’t the only one the sleaze traffickers were set on destroying last week either. A drama played out, mostly under the radar, regarding the 11th-hour charges of "touching" and a "connection" to "sex sites" against the Rev. Canon Gene Robinson, the new, openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church. The fact that the charges surfaced literally minutes before the bishops were to vote on confirming Robinson as a bishop—after weeks of bellowing outcries from conservatives and lots of media attention—was enough to give off the whiff of a smear campaign. But throw in the identity of who broke the non-story and what his connections are, and the stench becomes totally unbearable.
The nasty business began on Monday. As it happened, that afternoon on my radio program I was interviewing Diane Knippers, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, an orthodox Christian group. The IRD stands against "radical forms of feminism, environmentalism, pacifism, multi-culturalism, revolutionary socialism, [and] sexual liberation," and includes a subgroup, Episcopal Action, that opposes gay unions and was fiercely opposed to having Robinson become a bishop. Shortly after our spirited exchange, the vote on Robinson’s fate was postponed, because the charge had surfaced that a gay-youth group he had worked with had links from its website to porn, and, in a separate charge, that a man claimed Robinson inappropriately touched him.
Still on the air, I did a search and found that the source in the media that "broke" the "sex site" story was Fred Barnes in the conservative Weekly Standard, on its website. (Barnes is also a Fox News commentator, which explains why Fox seemed to be breaking it first on television.) I then realized that, in researching Knippers, I’d noticed how Barnes had been named to the board of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, which made his dubious hit on Robinson not only unseemly but a conflict of interest, to say the least.
The vote was postponed, with the wingnuts thinking they’d scored big. But a day later, the bishops completed their investigation into the charges, dismissing them outright. The conclusions: Robinson hadn’t been involved in the youth group for years; the links from the group weren’t direct but rather were several clicks removed from porn (as if just about every site on the web isn’t three clicks away from porn) and the "touching," claimed in an email from an adult male parishioner to one of the bishops, amounted to Robinson having touched the guy’s forearm and his back—something that, as the White House website shows, our president has done to just about every foreign leader he’s met. (W even grabbed Ariel Sharon—heavens to Betsy!—on the knee.)
Exactly who put the "touching" guy up to his dirty work isn’t clear (he later said he’d not really meant for his charges to become public). But it turns out that the smear about the link to "porn sites" was apparently shopped around to other news outlets, including CNN. Nobody ran with it because there was nothing there. The non-story only had legs after Fred Barnes finally wrote it up and Fox picked it up.
It’s curious that the orthodox group on whose board Barnes sits, the Institute for Religion and Democracy, is bankrolled by Richard Mellon Scaife and others who funded the smears about the Clintons. I talked about Barnes’ connection to the group on my program, and it was reported on a few websites—pushed by the blogger Atrios—but the only mainstream media outlet to pick it up, as far as I can tell, was the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which connected all the dots in a stinging editorial, headlined "The Anatomy of Smear."
"So we come full circle," the editors wrote, covering the events that impacted the Episcopal bishops’ convention, which was taking place in their city. "Gene Robinson, meet Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky. But there is a difference: In Clinton’s case, years of digging eventually produced evidence of private sexual misbehavior. Robinson appears guilty of nothing at all—save being a gay man who wants to be a bishop. For some, unfortunately, that is enough to justify all sorts of innuendo and dirty tricks. Be warned: This is the way they play."
And the only reason why they can get away with playing that way is because no one seems to expose it.
Michelangelo Signorile hosts a daily radio show on Sirius Satellite Radio, stream 149.
He can be reached at www.signorile.com.
Volume 16, Issue 33
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