The BEAST: Buffalo's Best Fiend

It’s the Hypocrisy, Stupid

Republicans Defend Gay Man, Pigs Fly

by Allan Uthman

Republicans are angry that the Jeff Gannon/Jim Guckert story won’t go away. Guckert, of course, is the now-infamous White House correspondent, the go-to guy for softball questions, who turns out to have been a serial plagiarist and a gay prostitute. He wrote under the pseudonym Jeff Gannon for a website call gopusa.com, clearly an advocacy site for the Republican Party.

Now his stories have been stripped from the website, and he is giving interviews, complaining to CNN’s Anderson Cooper that “the effect of this has been that we seem to have established a new standard for journalists in this country, where if someone disagrees with you, then your personal life, your private life, and anything you have ever done in the past is going to be brought up for public inspection.”

First of all, that standard is nothing new; it’s been in full effect since the Clinton era at least. Second, Guckert is exactly the kind of weasel who would jump on a story like this if it involved a Democrat.

But Guckert is not alone in defending his largely indefensible position. While most conservative columnists, along with the top newspapers in the country are simply not addressing the story, hordes of Republican bloggers, who usually wouldn’t touch a gay man with tongs, let alone defend his reputation, are protesting that the left has gone too far, that Gannon’s private life is off-limits, and, amazingly, accusing those keeping the story alive to be homophobes. The hypocrisy is jaw-dropping.

The people who are driving the Gannon/Guckert story are not homophobic. Most of them probably think prostitution should be legal. But Guckert’s homosexuality and promiscuity are absolutely fair game, because they indicate a fundamentally flawed personal philosophy.

It’s silly enough for Republicans to accuse anyone of hypocrisy while they are defending a homosexual, but these people are simply missing the point. To say his sexual orientation is an irrelevant issue is ridiculous. It is extremely relevant, if only as a reference to his astounding hypocrisy. If David Duke turned out to be a Jew, it would be newsworthy, and no one would call those who reported it anti-Semitic.

Guckert wrote often about John Kerry's “pro-homosexual platform” in the runup to the election. One of his stories was titled, "Kerry Could Become First Gay President." These stories, needless to say, were not positive, but designed to scare and anger homophobes, to fan the flames of their dumb hatred. He espoused the imagined moral superiority of his party and pandered to its most treasured prejudice, all while cornholing rich businessmen for $200 an hour. That isn’t relevant? Ridiculous.

What’s really got the Right’s panties twisted is that Guckert’s story is an uncomfortable reminder of their own inner conflicts, a crack in the wall of denial they’ve built in their minds to separate the standards by which they judge others from the realities of their own personal behavior.

Another recent example of this comes in the form of a snippet of tape, a clandestine recording of a private phone conversation between President Bush and Doug Wead, former special assistant to the first President Bush, wherein Bush clearly implies having used cocaine and pot, explaining that he wouldn’t admit it publicly, “…‘cause I don't want some little kid doing what I tried.”

The revelation is hardly a shocker. Everyone on both sides has long known that Bush was into his chemicals back when he was just a young middle-aged man, whether they acknowledged it or not. But what it epitomizes is the uncanny ability of conservatives to pride themselves in dishonesty and double standards. Bush’s logic is so twisted he even finds fault in Al Gore’s admission that he had tried reefer back in college.

Worse than that is, again, the hypocrisy of it: Bush doesn’t have any qualms about putting millions of non-violent offenders in prison for significant fractions of their lives for doing less than what he won’t acknowledge, but tacitly admits, he himself has done.

It is a paradox in the heart of every fire-and-brimstone preacher, every holier-than-thou pundit, every politician who campaigns primarily on “moral values.” Their standards apply to everyone but themselves. The moral values crowd is replete with immoral cretins, child molesters, rapists, murderers, thieves, and prostitutes, and they are usually the ones who shout loudest.

This denial is a pervasive element of the Republican agenda, and extends to policy: recent cabinet appointments are clearly designed to keep the lid on any information that the neocons don’t want us to hear, or just don’t want to hear themselves. The best examples of this are John Negroponte, who will be in charge of intelligence, and still denies the existence of death squads during his stay in Honduras, and stealth appointee Allan Weinstein, a dubious conservative “historian” who is now in charge of the National Archives, and will do everything in his considerable power to stop or delay the release of any records from this administration all the way back to Nixon’s.

Secrecy and denial are as much essential components of Bush’s White House as they are of a closet homosexual’s lifestyle. Penetrate the mirage, reveal the lie, and people get angry. Right-wingers are mad because, in essence, Guckert is Bush—a talentless pretender firing a cannon in a glass house.

I’m not saying you can’t be a gay Republican. I’m saying you can’t be a gay Republican and make any sense. It’s one thing to believe in smaller government and free markets, but to choose to support a party that explicitly finds you repugnant as a human being beggars the imagination.

It is this enhanced capacity for denial and hypocrisy that the Bush administration is relying on to get the job done. While they have spared no effort in preventing incriminating evidence from ever seeing daylight, this voluntary idiocy is their ace in the hole, ensuring that the inevitable drips and drabs of evidence (a little torture here, some malfeasance there) will in the end not be enough to topple them. Along with a complicit GOP-dominated congress and a court system stacked with collaborators, these factors combine to make the Bush White House a totally unbeatable force, and leaves Democrats in the unenviable role of playing the eternal loser Washington Generals to The Republican’s Harlem Globetrotters. At this point, “Hannity and Colmes” is an accurate portrayal of the political debate in this country and the power balance in our government.

Those of us outside the cult who are masochistic enough to keep paying attention are horrified, watching our country’s future go to pieces and powerless to do anything about it. It’s like watching someone kill your parents on closed circuit TV in a jail cell—frustration and horror in the extreme.

Jim Guckert, a liar, fraud and prostitute, is a perfect human embodiment of the modern Republican. And that is why they are so desperate for him to go away.

More by Allan Uthman

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It's the Hypocrisy, Stupid

Allan Uthman

Secrecy and denial are as much essential components of Bush’s White House as they are of a closet homosexual’s lifestyle. Penetrate the mirage, reveal the lie, and people get angry. Right-wingers are mad because, in essence, Guckert is Bush—a talentless pretender firing a cannon in a glass house.

Not Funny

Matt Taibbi

Man, is it easy to make money in this writing business in New York City. You youngsters out there who are still waiting to get published, still trolling for intern jobs, you may not see it yet. But take a good look at Kurt Andersen at New York if you want to see how it all works out at the end of the rainbow.

What Your Republican Boyfriend Really Means

Everyone knows Republican boyfriends are the hot new item this season. They're large and in charge, and they have all the money these days. However, many girls are finding that communication difficulties arise when they start getting to know their supply-side sweeties. Here's a guide to help you out.

Kyoto Fried Chicken

Alexander Zaitchik

Let's hope Earth never gets attacked by flesh-eating Martians. By the time the governments of the world mounted a counter-attack, we'd all be getting force-bred in Martian factory farms, wondering why the fat kids keep getting dragged away.

Beastmo Quiz: Are You Being Tortured?

AG Alberto Gonzalez

Relationships are tricky. Find out if your partner is going too far.

Buffalo in Briefs

Budgetary Bullshit

It's been an interesting two weeks watching our elected assholes scramble like mad chickens to pass a budget, and highly demonstrative of just how the government "works."

[sic] - letters

CRUISIN' FOR A BRUISIN'

Gentlemen:

I represent Tom Cruise. Your Issue #67 of "The Beast" contains false, defamatory and malicious assertions about Mr. Cruise. They include the following:

(1) That Mr. Cruise is a "cokehead." This is utterly false. He is not and never has been a "cokehead" or even a cocaine user. In fact, his fiercely anti-drug views are well known.

(2) That Mr. Cruise consistently casts women "for the purpose of nailing them."

Social Anxiety

Allan Uthman

I’m no slouch when it comes to math, and I even did well in economics, but I don’t have to look at the numbers to figure out whether Bush’s proposed changes to Social Security will be a boon or a disaster. All I have to do is look at who’s proposing them.

Sorry to Wake You

Matt Taibbi

1:36 a.m., Jan. 25. Somewhere along a row of darkened town houses near Arlington, VA, a phone rings.

RUMSFELD: Uh... Hello?

FEITH: Donny? Are you up, man?

RUMSFELD: Shit. Who is this?

Buffalo in Briefs

Playing Down Brown

Three weeks ago, the Buffalo News ran the results of a Zogby poll on our upcoming Mayoral election. The results were somewhat surprising, putting Byron Brown up front and spelling almost certain doom for Masiello, who may have actually lost to a canteloupe if it had been offered as an alternative in the poll.

Soylent Purple

Allan Uthman

“You see that shit?” Frank asked.

“Yeah,” he said, surprised to hear it. “I thought I was gonna puke.”

“Fucking hilarious, I know. It’s so ironic, really—if only they knew. Wouldn’t stop ‘em anyhow.”

“Knew what?”

He knocked back his whiskey, grimaced and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “The ink. What it’s made out of. You wouldn’t fucking believe it.”

Money Matta$$

50 Cent

Bump dat! Dow Jones Industrials capped dat week with a 120-point climb and broader stock indicators also moved substantially higher. The Standard & Poors 500 index surpassed the 1,200 level for the first time since Jan. 3. The PIMP index was also up despite the Labor Department's job creation report, which showed just 146,000 new jobs last month, far less than the 200,000 expected. Uh Uh Uh Uh.

Future World News

Machine to Sign Historic Accord with Man

"Logic dictates that Machine and Man must learn to work together to terminate our common enemy. The world stage is now set to end the tyranny of nature" said President 1100, in a transmission from the White Cube mercury garden.

"The most important thing at the summit will be a mutual declaration of cooperation of violence against the planet earth," said Omega Sheila E, a Nectaris negotiator.

Whole page as PDF

The 50 Most Loathsome People in America 2004

21. Alan Colmes
Crimes: An angry conservative’s wet dream: an effete liberal dive artist. As a professional doormat, Colmes’ only tasks are to serve as a comforting aggregate of Republican stereotypes about Democrats and a target for the seething derision of his psychotic guests. Stands idly by while voracious green-blooded co-host utilizes Gestapo tactics against centrist Democrats.

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Inaugural Balls

Allan Uthman

...The real problem isn't that Bush's vision is vague, or that it signals an imperialist agenda that has already been in place for years. It isn't even that he's completely revised his justification for war in Afghanistan and Iraq for a proudly amnesiac public, or that he's launching his trial run at Iran. The real problem about Bush's speech is that it simply isn't true, and doesn't make any sense. It's 100% manure from start to finish.