October 16, 2004

Oh, the Humanity

Posted by Kieran

Ted beat me to this, mostly. But I wanted to say this: I’m sure if we trawl through our 1990s archives we’ll find that the high-minded and their lofty correspondents

Reader Keith Rempel gets at the heart of what’s wrong here, and articulates what I couldn’t: “Kerry was using Cheney’s daughter to harm her father. … ANOTHER UPDATE: “More thoughts here: ‘thou shall NOT speak of another’s kid in any way that could POSSIBLY be construed as negative’ … MORE: … James Somers emails: “Kerry crassly exploited Cheney’s daughter for use against Bush and thus, by extension, Cheney. Perhaps you have to be a parent to understand what that means.”

were right out there on the front lines defending Chelsea Clinton from anything that might have been construed as insulting at the time. (We can leave aside — as perhaps too complex to grasp — the point that it is not actually an insult to mention that someone who has worked in various professional and political contexts doing outreach work with the gay community is, in fact, gay.) I’m waiting to see if the parallel to Chelsea strikes any of the people over at The Corner who are waving the flag of ‘common decency’ in defence of Mary Cheney at the moment. But, of course, I forget: when they’re insulted it’s an offense to common decency and civility, but when we’re insulted it’s just more political correctness and evidence that the left is too sensitive and has no sense of humor.

Posted on October 16, 2004 03:05 AM UTC
Comments

Indeed, no one has used a member of Kerry’s family as a political weapon against him. Nope, no sirree, no mention of her at all…

Posted by G. Svenson · October 16, 2004 01:13 AM

Comments about Chelsea were beyond the pale, and I’ve said so.

Just as when a co-worker sent me the picture of one of the candidate’s kids in the see-through dress. Deleted without forwarding.

Posted by Ethesis · October 16, 2004 02:00 AM

Isn’t saying that it’s OK because Rush Limbaugh does it kind of dropping the bar more than a little? I despise all the shock jocks of politics who’ve destroyed political debate in this country. It started going down the tubes back when Crossfire started on CNN and reached a nadir with Sean Hannity.

But dang, if the best defense for Kerry is, “well Limbaugh does it” then truly our democracy is in an even sadder state than cynics like me thought.

Posted by Clark Goble · October 16, 2004 02:37 AM

If these people knew how to manufacture anything other than “outrage” there would be a lot more job growth in this country.

Posted by TomF · October 16, 2004 03:08 AM

if the best defense for Kerry is, “well Limbaugh does it”

Argh. Of course that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that many of the people now yelling about decency and exploitation and poor Mary Cheney were the same people who didn’t hesitate to kick Chelsea Clinton around when the opportunity presented itself. So they’re hypocrites. That’s the narrow point. There’s nothing wrong with saying ‘Spare me the Instapundits of this world and their faux handwringing.’ It’s a long way from saying ‘Sauce for the Goose’ or whatever.

More broadly, I think their attitude is all the worse given that Kerry’s comments were absolutely not an “attack” or “smear” of Mary Cheney in the way that, say, John Derbyshire’s rant about hating Chelsea Clinton was an attack, or Limbaugh calling her “the White House Dog” was a smear.

People like Ethesis don’t rise to that sort of thing, and good for them. We might disagree about whether Kerry’s comments amounted to a smear, or that Mary Cheney (campaign employee, gay outreach/activism work, sexual orientation mentioned publicly previously by her father, etc, etc) was “dragged into the campaign” by Kerry — that debate is ongoing in Ted’s thread.

Posted by Kieran Healy · October 16, 2004 03:59 AM

Isn’t saying that it’s OK because Rush Limbaugh does it

No. Bzzt. That’s not what was said. You lose. Read the bit marked “perhaps too complex to grasp” above.

Posted by Robin Green · October 16, 2004 04:05 AM

Kieran, your link to “Ted’s thread” is directed at a post of Glenn’s — I am sure you are not calling Ted an instapundit; you probably meant to point at this post.

Posted by Jeremy Osner · October 16, 2004 04:20 AM

Or, well, strike that; probably this one.

Posted by Jeremy Osner · October 16, 2004 04:23 AM

For those not yet tempted, please do click through to that Derbyshire piece. These people are insane, and they are going to bully, bluff, and steal their way into power again, say the bookmakers.

Posted by david · October 16, 2004 04:24 AM

Whoops, sorry — yes, of course I meant that thread. Pasted the wrong entry from the clipboard.

Posted by Kieran Healy · October 16, 2004 04:28 AM

When you change the subject to the Rush Limbaughs and Sean Hannitys of the world and make the discourse a discourse about hypocrisy, that is exactly what you are rhetorically doing. A strategy I’d note seems rather common in Limbaugh when I’m forced to have to listen to him. Both sides are more focused on the hypocrisy of the other than they are on the issues at hand. Thus the reason they are brought up. (Otherwise, who gives a damn what Limbaugh does? Isn’t the focus Kerry and Bush?)

Regarding the second part, yes we all know Cheney’s daughter is gay. We knew it before. That’s not the issue. The issue is why bring it up? To say it wasn’t done for strategic and emotional impact is either to be amazingly naive or to hold one’s head under the sand. People can complain about whether there is a double standard about gays. I think there is a double standard. But that’s not the point. The point is that you’re using his daughter for political advantage. It’s offensive to people regardless of the facts of the case. It’s simply an other example of how politics gets lower and lower and turns more and more people off.

But no doubt we can bring up the James Carvills or Rush Limbaughs to say, “hey, it’s not that bad, and besides, the only reason it works is because there are a bunch of homophobes out there and if you are offended you must be one.”

Posted by Clark Goble · October 16, 2004 05:07 AM

Alas, this (see the comments) seems like it’s the best the right has to offer on this issue.

Posted by jpw · October 16, 2004 05:10 AM

The issue is why bring it up?

No, Clark. The issue is, why act like it’s a smear?

Posted by Kieran Healy · October 16, 2004 05:39 AM

Am I right in thinking that it makes little sense to claim that homosexuality is a choice? Because if we just grant the following (very plausible) extra premises, we can quickly derive a contradiction:

Start with

1.It is possible to choose homosexuality

Now add what everyone who advances arguments like this believes

2. Heterosexuality is not a matter of choice.

And the following relationship between the two preferences

3. Homosexuality is incompatible with heterosexuality.

And bingo, it’s possible to choose to be a homosexual, (by 1), thus it’s possible to choose not to be a heterosexual (by 3), which is just the denial of 2.

Which one could we (they) give up? Not 1, obviously, it’s the point of the exercise. And abandoning 2 makes the line of attack useless, since it admits that heterosexuality is on par with homosexuality in the matter.

That leaves only 3, but what does it mean to claim that people who have ‘chosen’ homosexuality are still heterosexual? Are they lying? Deluded? Have they super-added their homosexual preference onto their immutable heterosexual nature?

Can somebody help me out here?

Posted by epist · October 16, 2004 07:38 AM

But, of course, I forget: when they’re insulted it’s an offense to common decency and civility, but when we’re insulted it’s just more political correctness and evidence that the left is too sensitive and has no sense of humor.

Obviously they just learned from the master:

“Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”
— Mel Brooks

Posted by Nicolas Bray · October 16, 2004 07:58 AM

The attempt to divide homosexuality into the choice/innate seems inherently a false dichotomy. It almost certainly isn’t a conscious choice for many, many people, but it simultaneously seems in error to say it isn’t a choice for anyone.

Regarding whether it is or isn’t a smear. That, to me, isn’t the issue. The issue is bringing in a politician’s children to a political issue. i.e. making a political issue of their children. Whether it is or isn’t a smear I’ll leave for others to debate. Personally I think that a bit irrelevant. I do think it was done calculatingly and for political purposes by the Kerry campaign.

However don’t take this as partisan. I’ve gotten equally riled up at many of the things the Bush campaign has done and don’t get me started on the 527’s of both parties.

In my opinion political speech has come to a new low this year and the media has been reduced to battling soundbites rather than in depth and fair analysis. (Jon Stewart’s appearance on Crossfire the other day involved some well deserved criticism for the media)

Posted by Clark Goble · October 16, 2004 08:49 AM

Epist: your faulty premise is 3).

Posted by dsquared · October 16, 2004 01:15 PM

The ‘choice/destiny’ dichotomy is a wee bit simplistic, imho. An interesting perspective is offerend by Anne Fausto-Sterling’s Sexing the body.

Posted by pedro · October 16, 2004 02:59 PM

he ‘choice/destiny’ dichotomy is a wee bit simplistic, imho. An interesting perspective is offerend by Anne Fausto-Sterling’s Sexing the body.

Sorry for posting twice. The first time, something happened to the first link, and it disappeared.

Posted by pedro · October 16, 2004 03:02 PM

From Digby:

The morning news on Fox just spent half an hour talking about it and came to the conclusion that this was a bigger issue than taxes and the war in Iraq. Then one of the hideous dough boys wondered if the question had been on obesity, if it would have been appropriate for President Bush to bring up Elizabeth Edwards’s “problems.” I sure wish that all those moms and kids had heard that one.
Posted by Ted Barlow · October 16, 2004 03:47 PM

This isnt the first time that the Kerry’s have seen fit to interfer with other people’s family’s - remember Teresa Kerry and Edwards son at the Democratic convention?

And this presumptiousness underlies a deeper issue - namely who ultimately controls the family, the parents or the state?

The Kerry attitude suggests they lean towards that latter while the Republicans lean towards the former.

Posted by Giles · October 16, 2004 07:02 PM

clark goble writes: “Regarding the second part, yes we all know Cheney’s daughter is gay. We knew it before. That’s not the issue. The issue is why bring it up?”

The question in the debate was whether being gay is a choice.

Well, one could hardly think of someone less likely to have chosen to be gay than Mary Cheney, who was raised in such a conservative environment.

Posted by Jon H · October 16, 2004 07:16 PM

A particularly remarkable rightwing explanation for the Mary Mention was that Kerry was shoring up his support in the homophobic black and hispanic communities by mentioning a lesbian Republican. Another putatively homophobic constituency that Kerry was supposedly appealing to was “blue-haired old ladies”. There’s an element of desperation there, I think, desperation to make a mountain of cynical manipulation out of a molehill.

Along the lines of Juan Cole’s discussion, I think the Cheneys and other rightwingers are pretending to be angry so that they can appeal to people for whom the Mary Mention was akin to Kerry mentioning a somewhat embarrassing, unmentionable problem of Mary’s. (Plus, of course, this keeps the discussion off of Bush’s failings.)

So for example, suppose Mary Cheney had genital herpes. One could imagine this to be public knowledge, and even that Mary might be a public spokesman for sufferers of genital herpes. Still, it would not be something for Kerry to bring up, even supposing the question had been about the etiology of genital herpes. The wingers are appealing to people for whom lesbianism is akin to genital herpes.

Posted by Ken C · October 16, 2004 08:24 PM

The choice–genetics dichotomy is indeed a false one, but surely so is the heterosexual–homosexual one.

Posted by KCinDC · October 16, 2004 11:15 PM

a smear is untrue. this is true. it is however an attack. in this case it is an attack because for a significant portion of the voting public that tends to vote republican being gay is being wrong. thus kerry can manage to divide some of his opponents votes from him. in return the opponent tries to attack kerry by arguing that kerry’s attack means that kerry is not the caring liberal that he has been portrayed as, this is, to say the least, a problematic line of attack on kerry.

“Regarding the second part, yes we all know Cheney’s daughter is gay. We knew it before. That’s not the issue. The issue is why bring it up?”
I personally have a reason why this attack should be brought and more forcefully than it has been, mary cheney’s lesbianism is the lifestyle choice of privilege, her father’s party attempts to derive political benefit from hating gays, it produces legislation that is inimicable to gay people, while mary cheney is gainfully employed as professional gay republican icon for moderates to feel that supporting a hateful agenda is okay. disecting the discrepancy would be very beneficial to the body politic.

Posted by bryan · October 16, 2004 11:57 PM

For a significant portion of the voting public, being a Democrat is being wrong. That doesn’t mean saying someone is a Democrat is an attack, especially if the fact was already discussed in a previous debate.

Posted by KCinDC · October 17, 2004 12:19 AM

“Kerry was using Cheney’s daughter to harm her father….”

It seems that if I publicly criticized Mr. X for beating his daughter that I would be in violation of this principle.

“More thoughts here: ‘thou shall NOT speak of another’s kid in any way that could POSSIBLY be construed as negative’

Upon hearing that Mrs. Y had said that daughter above “…had probably deserved it…”, would this indeed be further proof of my error?

Posted by markf · October 17, 2004 04:03 AM

It is one thing to say something about a child, and even when she was in college Chelsea was a child. But Mary isa 35 year old woman that works full time for BCO4. So bring her up and Chelsea are really two different things.

Posted by spencer · October 17, 2004 05:53 PM

I’m saying that many of the people now yelling about decency and exploitation and poor Mary Cheney were the same people who didn’t hesitate to kick Chelsea Clinton around when the opportunity presented itself.

Did you actually verify this? And if you did, do you think you did enough to explicitly limit your complaint to those that are guilty of this? Or are you attempting to tar every right-winger that is complaining about the Mary Cheney mention with this hypocrisy brush?

I won’t deny that I, too, sometimes indulge in coupling hypocrisy accusations with generalizations. It’s so damn easy to just generalize “those people” (in this case and my case, the right-wingers) as all holding to some view and some behavior, and then claiming hypocrisy for the group as a whole when some particular members of that group are hypocritical. The end result is that mentally I’ve just reinforced my caricaturing of a disfavored viewpoint or group.

Posted by Keith Ellis · October 18, 2004 09:11 AM

epist: as dsquared said, the error is probably in your 3rd premise. Specifically, probably, the cultural conservative view is that by nature, all people are heterosexual but that heterosexual people can choose to engage in homosexual activity or even a general homosexual orientation, but to do so is in some sense “wrong”. One can disagree with one of more of their assumptions, but I don’t think the reasoning is invalid.

I’ll take this opportunity to repeat my warning that although a naturist position on homosexuality is attractively useful for political purposes in the short term to those of us advocating gay rights, in the long term it may be very counter-productive. Anyway, this position may be factually wrong; and in any case it is mostly irrelevant. Would any of us be willing to legalize/protect homosexual behavior for homosexuals only but criminalize homosexual behavior by heterosexuals? I sure wouldn’t. I prefer to answer the cultural conservatives’ moral argument directly: there’s absolutely nothing wrong with homosexuality.

Posted by Keith Ellis · October 18, 2004 09:24 AM
Followups

→ I’m sure if we trawl through our 1990s archives we’ll find that the high-minded and their lofty correspondents were right out there on the front lines defending Chelsea Clinton from anything that might have been construed as insulting at the.
Excerpt: Crooked TimberRead more at BlogBites
→ Forget sex, let's talk about fraud.
Excerpt: Let's not fight about Mary Cheney anymore. There's fraud afoot! Here's just one example. Read Norweigian Chef's detailed Dkos entries, summarized briefly below: BACKGROUND: There are two high profile voter suppression and intimidation situations taking...Read more at Majikthise
→ Forget sex, let's talk about fraud.
Excerpt: Let's not fight about Mary Cheney anymore. There's fraud afoot! Here's just one example. Read Norweigian Chef's detailed Dkos entries, summarized briefly below: BACKGROUND: There are two high profile voter suppression and intimidation situations taking...Read more at Majikthise
→ Forget sex, let's talk about fraud.
Excerpt: Let's not fight about Mary Cheney anymore. There's fraud afoot! Here's just one example. Read Norweigian Chef's detailed Dkos entries, summarized briefly below: BACKGROUND: There are two high profile voter suppression and intimidation situations taking...Read more at Majikthise
→ Forget sex, let's talk about fraud.
Excerpt: Let's not fight about Mary Cheney anymore. There's fraud afoot! Here's just one example. Read Norweigian Chef's detailed Dkos entries, summarized briefly below: BACKGROUND: There are two high profile voter suppression and intimidation situations taking...Read more at Majikthise
→ Forget sex, let's talk about fraud.
Excerpt: Let's not fight about Mary Cheney anymore. There's fraud afoot! Here's just one example. Read Norweigian Chef's detailed Dkos entries, summarized briefly below: BACKGROUND: There are two high profile voter suppression and intimidation situations taking...Read more at Majikthise

This discussion has been closed. Thanks to everyone who contributed.