The GOP civil war will be televised

Media Matters: The GOP civil war will be televised

Everything on Election Day went pretty much as expected. Republicans are up, Democrats are down, and Dick Morris once again looks like a fool. But as big as Tuesday was politically, it lacked, as have past midterms, a feeling of punctuation. No sooner had the House changed hands than speculation began on 2012 Republican presidential candidates. This is in large part due to the obsessive political media (GOP pollster Rasmussen has already polled the likely matchups). One election cycle ends, and the next immediately begins.

And while we're still about 14 months from the first votes being cast in the 2012 elections, we're nonetheless going to get a protracted and dramatic look at the selection process for the Republican nomination. All we have to do is switch on Fox News.

The Murdoch network currently has on its payroll no fewer than four right-wingers whose names consistently pop up in discussions of President Obama's putative GOP challengers: Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, and Mike Huckabee. Fox also frequently hosts former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, whose name has been tossed around as a dark-horse candidate. As the election cycle coverage heats up, Fox will be forced to make some awkward choices in how it covers the campaigns of their colleagues.

And the trouble has already begun.

While not a candidate himself, Fox News' Karl Rove will be a key player in the 2012 GOP primaries, largely through his Wall Street-funded Republican piggy bank, American Crossroads. One can speculate as to which candidate he prefers, but one doesn't have to guess who he doesn't want to challenge Obama -- Fox News' Sarah Palin.

The feud between these two has been simmering since Palin injected herself into the Republican primaries of various Senate campaigns and helped Tea Party candidates snatch nominations from more electable Republicans, only to see them lose in the general election (see: Sharron Angle and, if trends hold, Joe Miller.)

But no candidate better represented the Rove-Palin rift than Delaware's Christine O'Donnell, who secured the nomination on the strength of Palin's endorsement and then bombed in the general. Not long after O'Donnell was minted as the nominee, Rove said (on Fox) that she did not "evince the characteristics of rectitude and truthfulness" and that the race had become unwinnable. Those remarks earned him a keel hauling from the right-wing media. Palin, for her part, said (also on Fox) that everyone who thought O'Donnell couldn't win needed to "buck up" and put aside their "egos."

As the Senate looked more and more like it would stay in Democratic hands, Rove and Palin quit fighting through proxies and just started bashing each other. Last week, the U.K. Telegraph reported that Rove trashed Palin's new reality TV program and "said it was unlikely that voters would regard someone starring in a reality show as presidential material." The article also quoted Rove saying Palin lacks "a certain level of gravitas."

Palin, as we all know, thrives on victimhood and will never fail to respond to any criticism, no matter how slight or imagined. She fired back at Rove (again on Fox News) by suggesting he is "threatened" and "paranoid." She also compared herself to Ronald Reagan, though he was a TV star before he was politician, not the other way around. A couple of days later (on Fox News) she lobbed a nonspecific attack at "these Neanderthals, these goofballs, these nitwits" who were attacking her in the press.

Rove is, of course, not without allies in this fight. His former Bush administration colleagues -- like speechwriter Michael Gerson and, reportedly, W. himself -- don't think much of Palin as a candidate. He also has the support of Fox News colleague Mort Kondracke, who blamed Palin for the Republican failure to capture the Senate and called her "a joke even within her own party." His problem is that Palin also has allies -- namely, the louder corners of the right-wing media. Having already earned their wrath over his O'Donnell criticism, Rove apologized to Palin (once again, on Fox News), saying he "didn't mean any offense" in criticizing her reality program.

Palin also has the tea party firmly in her corner, and Rove has to respect that. Even though several of her anointed Senate candidates were wiped out on Tuesday, the fact that they were even in a position to lose is a testament to Palin's political clout. And so Rove has to thread the needle of making Palin an unacceptable choice for the nomination while not alienating her powerful base of support. So he attacks Christine O'Donnell, and then apologizes. He attacks Palin, and then apologizes.

In the middle of all this is Fox News. The network was going to be a battleground for the nomination regardless, given that they essentially operate as a shadow RNC and willingly offer their airwaves to Republican candidates looking to do a little fundraising. And they've already launched a series of candidate profiles called "12 in '12." But having numerous potential candidates on their payroll complicates things even further.

Palin's being coy about her presidential prospects, but the millions of dollars Fox News pays her (and the Alaska-based studio they built for her) will undoubtedly prove useful should she choose to toss in her hat. Rove isn't running, but he nonetheless will have a dog in the fight and financial interests wrapped up in the race, and Fox is paying him for -- ahem -- "independent" political analysis.

And then there's Huckabee, who ingratiates himself to potential voters and key GOP officials with each episode of his Fox News program. One can never tell whether Newt Gingrich's threats to run for president are genuine or just a ploy to sell books, and if Santorum runs he'll have some interesting hurdles to clear, but having a paid platform to get their messages out certainly doesn't hurt. Just this week Santorum gushed about how great it is that Republicans have Fox News to "get a message out."

There are interests conflicting all over the place, and what we're seeing now with Palin and Rove is a situation where political figures are appearing on a news channel to attack one another and defend their interests, and being paid for it by that same news channel. When you mix that in with parent company News Corp.'s newfound willingness to openly donate huge sums of cash to partisan GOP outfits, you have an ethical morass that borders on comical.

Fox's past response to their (many) ethical lapses has been to pretend that nothing's wrong. But this is a bigger breach of journalistic ethics than anything they've done before, and whether they can continue to play dumb remains to be seen.

But one thing's for sure: The road to the 2012 Republican presidential nomination runs right through Fox News.

10 Terrible Things Republicans Will Try to Do If They Take Over in November

Think things are bad now? Take a look at what could happen if Republicans retake Congress in November.

Democrats are in trouble come November. If current polling is any indication, Republicans have a good chance of reclaiming a majority in the House of Representatives and perhaps even the prospect). That's not because people are wildly excited about Republicans. In fact, a recent poll shows that registered voters rate the GOP's performance as worse than the Democrats'. But the enthusiasm gap between the parties gives the GOP an advantage; a nine-point advantage among likely voters, according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

Perhaps Americans should know what's really at stake if this batch of Republicans takes over Congress in November. Here are 10 terrible things the GOP might do:

1) Shut down government to stop health care bill. "All the Republican Congress needs to say in January is, 'We won't fund it," said former Speaker of the House and likely 2012 presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich, speaking about the GOP leadership’s intent to shut down the government to stop health care reform from being enacted. He should know. He did it before, back in 1995 when the Republicans reclaimed Congress during the Clinton administration. The GOP's government shutdown was disastrous for millions of Americans.

Since Republicans can't directly repeal the bill -- President Obama would veto such an action -- they may cut funding in order to hold up its implementation, forcing a stand-off with Democrats that could lead to government shutdown. Gingrich isn't the only one sounding this threat. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., said, "The endgame is a fight over funding." Rep. Mike Pence called rolling back health reform a "mainstream GOP position."

Meanwhile, in an interview with TPM, Donna Shalala, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services during the Clinton administration, discussed the consequences of government shutdown. Services would be stopped: "Social Security checks, Medicare reimbursements...welfare checks to the state, Medicaid checks to the state." Federal employees would be furloughed. It would "stop all new enrollees into the [Social Security] system," Shalala said. She continued, "It bounces through: it's grocery stores, it's farms [...] It bounces through when people don't have money at that scale." Shalala also pointed out that the economy is in far worse shape today than it was during the Clinton years, so the impact of government shutdown would likely be worse than in the 1990s.

2) Attempt to privatize Social Security. Back in 2005, former President George W. Bush tried to privatize Social Security by creating independent spending accounts, similar to 401Ks. He failed. But unlike Republicans today, Bush did not have the advantage of Tea-Party backed ultraconservative Republicans, some of whom honestly believe the only role of the federal government is to fight wars and protect our borders. Among the GOP’s up and comers is Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the ranking Republican member of the House Budget Committee. He wants to create personal spending retirement accounts invested in the stock market, which sounds a lot like the current 401K system: You know, the one that lost nearly 40 percent of its value during the financial crisis.

Social Security privatization, once considered politically untenable even by many ultraconservative think-tanks, has resurfaced just in time for the 2010 primary. It’s being debated in Arizona, Kentucky, Indiana, Nevada, North Dakota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Republicans like Sharron Angle in Nevada, Ken Buck in Colorado, Rand Paul, the Republican nominee in Kentucky, and Dan Coates, the Republican nominee in Indiana, all support “private retirement accounts” -- code for privatizing Social Security.

3) Spend every waking hour investigating the Obama administration. You thought Ken Starr was awful? Meet Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota. She thinks that if Republicans retake Congress, they should issue subpoena after subpoena and launch investigation after investigation of the Obama administration.

"Oh, I think that's all we should do," she told CBS News. "I think that all we should do is issue subpoenas and have one hearing after another.”

"All of our chips are on November," she added.

And it’s not just Bachmann. GOP House members have already pushed Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine to say he will investigate the wholly made-up New Black Panther Party scandal. Politico reports that conversations with top GOP aides reveal, "Republicans are planning a wave of committee investigations targeting the White House and Democratic allies if they win back the majority. Everything from the microscopic — the New Black Panther party — to the massive –- think bailouts — is on the GOP to-do list."

4) Repeal the 14th amendment -- divest immigrants' children of citizenship. In the growing nativist fervor within the Republican party, there's been a push to repeal the 14th amendment, which provides citizenship to all people born in the U.S. Republicans, trying desperately to woo the anti-immigrant crowd, are promoting this incredibly xenophobic idea. Here’s what minority leader John Boehner said about repealing birthright citizenship: "Listen, I think it's worth considering. But it's a serious problem that affects our country. And in certain parts of our country, clearly, our schools, our hospitals, are being overrun by illegal immigrants, a lot of whom came here just so their children could become U.S. citizens."

Of all the ridiculous and dangerous policy initiatives, this is the most heartless. It's driven by racist ideologies and was essentially penned by a hate group, Federation for American Immigration Reform. Boehner is not the only one pandering to the “No more anchor baby” nativist contingent. U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-TX, actually claimed that immigrant infants would one day form terrorist cells. "It appeared that [the terrorists] would have young women, who became pregnant, would get them into the United States to have a baby," Gohmert said during a speech on the House floor. "And then they would turn back where they could be raised and coddled as future terrorists."

There are two ways they may try revoking birthright citizenship to immigrants born in this country. Some Republicans propose creating a constitutional amendment asserting that one or both parents must be U.S. citizens, and the other is to pass federal or state legislation that could provoke a court battle over the amendment's citizenship clause. Republicans Russell Pearce, of Arizona, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz. are all pushing for hearings to explore the citizenship clause, which was enacted originally to provide an objective criteria for citizenship. Republicans want to remove that objective measurement and make citizenship subject to their own ideas about who deserves to be an American citizen.

5) Cap and trade? Forget about it. Not only are conservative activists aggressively campaigning against Democrats who support cap and trade -- legislation that mandates emissions reductions -- but they are also trying to unseat moderate Republicans who support cap and trade and replace them with ultraconservative, often Tea Party-backed politicians. Rep. John Boehner has already promised as part of his pitch to be Speaker of the House that he would oppose the measure. Conservative Republican Senate and House candidates across the country are campaigning against cap and trade, using it to hammer moderate Republicans and Democrats.

"It's a very big deal," said Brian Walsh, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Delaware, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Kentucky are among the states where opposing cap and trade, he believes, is helping Republicans win tight races.

In California, Charles and David Koch, the two billionaires responsible for financing the Tea Party movement, have already donated $1 million to suspend the Global Warming Solutions Act. And they say they are prepared to invest more. In California alone, the war chest to repeal the Act already has $8.2 million with roughly $7.9 million coming directly from state energy firms. Likewise, the Koch brothers and business groups have financially backed dozens of Republican candidates running against pro-cap and trade Democrats and even a few moderate Republicans who support the legislation.

6) More disastrous economic policies like the practices that caused our financial crisis. Financial regulatory reform was not perfect. But even the little Obama managed to do will be in danger if Republicans regain control of the Congress.

"If Republicans who oppose Wall Street reform are so offended by holding big banks accountable, then they should have to share with voters whether or not they would support repeal of the bill if elected," said DSCC spokesman Eric Schultz. "Any Republican who wants to return to the no-holds-barred, letting the big banks run rampant... jeopardizing Americans' savings and investments will absolutely be held accountable for that position during the campaign."

Well, according to Fox Business, Rep. Darrell Issa wants finance reform repealed altogether. On Wednesday, Issa fired his first salvo at the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, introducing a measure that would repeal parts of it. And once again, Issa is not the only one. When it comes to protecting the interests of the extremely wealthy, the Republican leadership continues to be in lockstep. Let’s remember the bill only passed 60-39 with nearly the entire Republican party opposing it. Shortly after it was passed, those same Republicans started calling for repeal. House Minority Leader John Boehner told reporters on the day of the vote, “I think it ought to be repealed.”

“If we were in a position to do something, maybe [Boehner] is right,” said GOP Policy Chairman Sen. John Thune of North Dakota. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-AL, said he’d “love for it to be repealed.” Sen. Richard Shelby, R-AL, the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, told "Good Morning America" that he and other Republicans would “like to repeal it.”

The only thing stopping them -- and the only reason we were able to manage any type of reform at all -- is that Republicans are in the minority. With a majority in Congress, they will come back emboldened, on a mission.

7) Kill or drastically slash Food Stamp program. During times of financial crisis, the Republicans will always cut safety net programs before raising taxes on the rich. We already know this. Back when Congress approved the 2009 Recovery Act, it included a 13.6 percent increase in food stamp benefits to aid workers hit by the recession. The entire Republican right opposed this $787 billion stimulus package, and they are simply waiting for an opportunity -- as with health care and financial regulatory reform -- to undo its provisions. At present, they eked out concessions from Democrats that will gut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) of $14.1 billion.

Carl Paladino, the Republican candidate for governor in New York, even suggested putting welfare recipients in prison dorms where they could work in state-sponsored jobs, get employment training and take lessons in "personal hygiene." The Tea Party-backed Paladino, a wealthy Buffalo real estate developer, won Tuesday night. He ran his campaign against social service programs in New York.

Food Stamps are a lifeline for the low-income and the unemployed. At a time when at least 10 percent of the country is unemployed, food stamps could mean the difference between barely surviving and dying from hunger. Nationwide, a record 40.8 million people — one in every eight — currently receive SNAP benefits. In poorer states the number is one in five or six.

8) Roll back and repeal equal rights for gays. The Republican party is quieter these days on social issues like gay rights, but the party platform has not changed from six years ago when it railed against gay marriage, pressed for the Defense of Marriage Act, and stated that homosexuality and military service were incompatible.

"Attempts to redefine marriage in a single state or city could have serious consequences throughout the country, and anything less than a Constitutional amendment, passed by the Congress and ratified by the states, is vulnerable to being overturned by activist judges," the Republican party platform stated back in 2004.

In recent days, the Montana GOP has actually taken that anti-gay message a step further. The Montana GOP platform now calls for making homosexuality illegal.

Meanwhile, at the Value Voters summit last Friday, Republican elected members of Congress sought to reassure their cultural conservative base that opposing gay marriage continues to be important to the Republican party. Politicians like Delaware Republican nominee Christine O'Donnell, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney were there to reassure the anti-gay religious right.

"Ours is not so much a fiscal crisis, it's a family crisis," Huckabee told the group. "There is a direct correlation between the stability of the family and stability of our country."

"Those of us who have toiled for years in the values movement found ourselves surrounded by Americans who had rediscovered the most fundamental value of all, liberty," O'Donnell told the audience, bridging the gap between cultural conservatives and the Tea Party movement.

Family Research Council president Tony Perkins said he was working closely with House Minority Leader John A. Boehner, R- Ohio, to ensure their anti-gay, anti-abortion agenda would continue to be a part of the GOP platform.

9) Abandon the unemployed. In March, Senate Republicans filibustered an extension of unemployment benefits. At the time Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl called the entire unemployment insurance system a necessary evil.

Back then, several Republicans made the claim that unemployment benefits keep people from looking for work. Among them was Georgia Republican Rep. John Linder. Another conservative claimed that stripping the unemployed of benefits would force them to “sober up.”

This claim was backed up by the conservative Heritage Foundation and Fox News, until it actually transformed the national debate into the question, “Do extending benefits to the unemployed create a disincentive to find work?"

During that one-week Senate impasse, while the Republican majority filibustered extending unemployment benefits, more than 2 million Americans lost their benefits.

10) Paralyze one branch of our government. You may disagree with President Obama, but immobilizing one branch of our three-branch system is no way to run a government. If the Republican party regains the majority in Congress it will continue to maneuver from the mid-'90s congressional playbook. The key to regaining power in Congress has been obstruction, and it will continue to be the key to regaining control of the White House.

In February, there were nearly 200 executive appointees still waiting confirmation. Many of these vacancies are critical to running the government. (During the same period of the Bush administration there were only 77 vacancies.) In March, President Obama was forced to start making recess appointments trying to circumvent unwarranted opposition in Congress. Just last week, Obama was forced to make Elizabeth Warren a special adviser to the White House in an effort to get around the Republican minority in Congress.

Republicans have held up appointments for the sake of union-busting. They have used "secret holds" and refused to offer justification. But more importantly, they have held up appointments simply because they can.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., described the unprecedented secret holds as institutionalizing dysfunction. “This seems to be an attack on this administration to do its constitutional duty."

In the end, this may prove sufficiently bad for the president; but the implications for the citizens of this country are far more dangerous.

Devona Walker has worked for the Associated Press and the New York Times company. Currently she is the senior political and finance reporter for theloop21.com.

Forget Mehlman — What About Lincoln?

New “paradigm” embraces scholarship on Honest Abe’s homosexuality

While the gay media has been awash in unwarranted hosannas over the recent coming-out declaration by former Republican National Committee chair Ken Mehlman — who has not apologized for running the most homophobic presidential campaign in US history — the LGBT press has been ignoring an infinitely more significant development under way with vastly more important implications for the Republican Party: the increasing acceptance by historians that the loving heart of Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator and the first GOP president, found its natural amorous passions overwhelmingly directed toward those of his own sex.

This shifting consensus about Lincoln’s sexual orientation is certainly the most stunning and effective rebuke to the Republican Party’s scapegoating of same-sex love for electoral purposes, which came to fever pitch during the 2004 race that Mehlman spearheaded for George W. Bush.

“We are getting closer to the day that a majority of younger, less homophobic historians will at long last accept the evidence of Lincoln’s same-sex component,” John Stauffer, chair of Harvard University’s Department of American Civilization, told Gay City News, adding, “ We’re already seeing the beginnings of a trend that will amount to a major paradigm shift.”

Stauffer is one of the nation’s leading experts on the Civil War era, and in his latest — and best-selling — book, “Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglas and Abraham Lincoln,” he supports the thesis that Joshua Speed was, as he put it, “Lincoln’s soulmate and the love of his life.”

And in the latest issue of the scholarly journal Reviews of American History, Stauffer hammers home this point, writing, “In light of what we know about romantic friendship at the time, coupled with the facts surrounding Speed’s and Lincoln’s friendship, there is no reason to suppose they weren’t physically intimate at some point during their four years of sleeping together in the same small bed, long after Lincoln could afford a bed of his own. To ignore this, as most scholars do, is to pretend that same-sex carnal relationships were abnormal. It thus presumes a dislike or fear about such relationships, reflecting a presentist and homophobic perspective.”

In his groundbreaking 2005 book “The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln,” the late C.W. Tripp meticulously assembled the considerable body of historical evidence for Lincoln’s same-sex affinities, including his love affair with Speed. Tripp, who worked closely in the 1940s and 1950s with the groundbreaking sexologist Alfred Kinsey, was a clinical psychologist, university professor, and author of the 1975 bestseller “The Homosexual Matrix,” which helped transcend outdated Freudian clichés and establish that a same-sex affectional and sexual orientation is a normal and natural occurrence.

In his book on Lincoln, Tripp drew on his years with Kinsey, who, he wrote, “confronted the problem of classifying mixed sex patterns by devising his 0-to-6 scale, which allows the ranking of any homosexual component in a person’s life from none to entirely homosexual. By this measure Lincoln qualifies as a classical 5 — predominantly homosexual, but incidentally heterosexual.”

A majority of Lincoln scholars dumped on Tripp’s book when it was published five years ago, but the “paradigm shift” on Lincoln of which Stauffer speaks is not only being led by younger historians like himself (Stauffer received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1999, began teaching at Harvard that year, and was tenured in 2004).

In a lengthy article entitled “Abraham Lincoln and the Tripp Thesis” in a recent issue of one of the oldest scholarly journals devoted to the iconic president, the Lincoln Herald, a senior Lincoln historian and author of numerous Lincoln books, the octogenarian William Hanchett, professor of history emeritus at the University of California/ San Diego, “challenges historians to either refute the Tripp thesis or to rewrite Lincoln’s biography. Hanchett believes that Tripp is correct at least in the broad outline of his work and finds it frustrating that most historians, rather than confronting this pioneering study, choose to ignore it,” as the Lincoln Herald’s editors put it in introducing Hanchett’s revealing, carefully footnoted essay on Lincoln’s same-sex affinities.

Hanchett in particular breaks new ground when he deconstructs what we know of the much-ignored secret Memo books kept by Lincoln’s law partner William Herndon as he spent a quarter century intensively researching his massive “Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life,” published in 1889. The UC/ San Diego scholar details how he believes that the otherwise thorough Tripp missed the evidence there that backs up Hanchett’s view that “Lincoln’s secret” was homosexuality.

“A significant number of Lincoln’s contemporaries,” Hanchett writes, “must have known of or strongly suspected his secret. The existence of Herndon’s Memo books proves it. His rowdy friends in New Salem must have wondered why [Lincoln] declined to participate with them in their revels, and almost certainly some of them must have figured it out. They knew about homosexuality, only the word was unknown to them.”

With the exception of a brief notice in the Gay and Lesbian Review by Tripp’s collaborator Lewis Gannett, the gay press has utterly ignored the validation of Tripp’s portrayal of Lincoln’s love affair with Speed by Stauffer, as it has Hanchett’s stunning article expanding on Tripp’s documentation of Lincoln’s same-sex emotional and physical life.

Others, preceding Tripp, had proclaimed in print that Lincoln was gay. The first, some four decades ago, was the pioneer Los Angeles gay activist Jim Kepner, editor of ONE, the early gay magazine. Kepner focused on Lincoln’s long-acknowledged intimate friendship with Speed, as did later writers, like the historian of gay America Jonathan Ned Katz and University of Massachusetts professor Charles Shively. Gore Vidal has said in interviews that, in researching his 1984 historical novel on Lincoln, he began to suspect that the 16th president had same-sex romantic relationships. But all this was little noticed outside the gay community.

One of the few traditional Lincolnists to describe — however obliquely — the lifelong Lincoln-Speed relationship as homosexual was the Illinois poet Carl Sandburg, in his masterful, six-volume Lincoln biography. In the 1926 tome titled “The Prairie Years,” Sandburg wrote that both Lincoln and Speed had “a streak of lavender, and spots soft as May violets.”

“I do not feel my own sorrows more keenly than I do yours,” Lincoln wrote Speed in one letter. And elsewhere: “You know my desire to befriend you is everlasting.” In a detailed retelling of the Lincoln-Speed love story — including the “lust at first sight” encounter between the two young men, when Lincoln readily accepted Speed’s eager invitation to share his narrow bed — Tripp notes that Speed was the only human being to whom the president ever signed his letters with the unusually tender (for Lincoln) “yours forever” — a salutation Lincoln never even used with his wife.

Speed himself acknowledged, “No two men were ever so intimate.” And Tripp credibly describes Lincoln’s near nervous breakdown following Speed’s decision to end their four-year affair by returning to his native Kentucky.

In the preface to his massive biography, Sandburg wrote, “Month by month in stacks and bundles of facts and legend, I found invisible companionships that surprised me. Perhaps a few of these presences lurk and murmur in this book.”

Tripp’s book was remarkable and precedent-shattering because, for the first time, he restores names and faces (more than just Speed’s) to a number of those previously invisible homosexual companions and love objects of the most venerated of America’s presidents, among them: Henry C. Whitney, another of Lincoln’s law colleagues; the young Billy Greene, a New Salem contemporary of Lincoln’s and another bedmate (who admired Lincoln’s thighs); Nat Grigsby; and A.Y. Ellis. Another was the handsome David Derickson, by nine years the president’s junior, captain of President Lincoln’s bodyguard. Tripp describes in great detail how Derickson was the object of “the kinds of gentle and concentrated high-focus attention from Lincoln that Henry C. Whitney, from having himself once been on the receiving end, well described: ‘[It was] as if he wooed me to close intimacy and friendship, a kind of courtship, as indeed it was.’”

There is a great deal more to Tripp’s book, which — as Lincoln scholar Jean Baker noted in her admiring preface — “is not a work of sexual or biological reductionism, but rather a significant effort to understand a complicated man.” Among the many invaluable contributions is the chapter revealing that Lincoln’s supposed tragic “romance” with Anne Rutledge — often hyped by Hollywood retelling — was a myth invented after Lincoln’s death. This chapter is for the most part due to the research of Gannett, Tripp’s faithful collaborator on the Lincoln project, who edited the book for publication after Tripp’s death and has just published a longer version of his destruction of the Rutledge myth in the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, another scholarly review.

Some of Tripp’s findings came from finely argued circumstantial deductions — which were seized upon to denounce the book by many of what Vidal has called the “scholar squirrels” of the considerable Lincoln industry, who have a lot of skin in the game.

“Why [have] scholars [been] so willfully blind to the host of historical evidence that Lincoln had a strong homosexual component?,” Harvard’s Stauffer wrote to this reporter in an email, explaining, “The answer stems from the intense homophobia throughout 20th century America, which has profoundly shaped Lincoln scholarship. Every scholar needs to read previous scholarship on Lincoln; and even comparatively open-minded scholars, after reading the mass of Lincoln scholarship, can easily be persuaded into perpetuating the blindness about Lincoln’s relationship with Speed.”

Stauffer, however, underscored in his email, “These explanations don’t account for the fact that most scholars today can agree that other well-known and beloved figures, such as Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, had strong homosexual tendencies but deny that Lincoln did, despite similar evidence. The reason for this paradox, and perhaps the central reason why scholars have been willfully blind to the evidence on Lincoln, is because most view him as the ‘redeemer president’— essentially ‘America’s Christ’ — and don’t want America’s Christ having strong homosexual tendencies.”

However, the “paradigm shift” currently in progress in historians’ views of Lincoln’s sexuality is ultimately much more important news than Ken Mehlman’s tardy, skillfully crafted, self-serving admission about his own.

Mehlman has now cashed in on his political past and is making a fortune as a managing director at Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, the giant private equity firm with a total committed capital of $58 billion, and he’s cushily nestled among hordes of gay gym bunnies in a Chelsea coop worth a reported $3.7 million. No doubt his skimpy coming-out declaration to the Atlantic Monthly’s Mark Ambinder will facilitate his new social life in the gay ghetto.

Of course, Ambinder did not challenge any of Mehlman’s mendacious assertions pretending he had no responsibility for the virulent gay-bashing of the national 2004 campaign, or Mehlman’s pretense that Bush is “not a homophobe.” Bush’s political homophobia was deployed long before he smeared gays and used them as a winning wedge issue as president — witness the subliminal gay-baiting of Anne Richards in the campaign that elected him governor of Texas, after which Bush as governor tried to take adopted children away from gay couples who loved them. Armbinder let all of Mehlman’s rewriting of history pass without any question or factual corrective.

Mehlman’s oft-repeated mantra was that he was “proud to be the chairman of the Party of Lincoln.” But the historians’ ongoing “paradigm shift” on the sexuality of our 16th president means that, when Republicans like Mehlman who claimed Lincoln as their political progenitor tried to introduce a ban on recognition of same-sex love into the Constitution that Lincoln defended so well, they wounded the martyr-president squarely in his heart of hearts.

DOUG IRELAND

GAY CITY NEWS

Why Does The Tea Party Hate America

First, they voted against the Democrats' economic stimulus plan. Then they voted against expanding health care to working families and cutting Medicare costs for seniors. And against keeping teachers and police on the job. Then they held up unemployment benefits for millions of Americans who had earned them! Now the Tea Party Republicans have a plan to increase unemployment if they take back control of Congress in November. How will they do it? 1. Cut federal investment in green jobs, public services, and small business lending 2. Cut taxes for the rich just like George W. Bush did. 3. Unleash Wall Street speculators and big corporations to ship jobs outside the United States. We have just eight weeks to stop them! Whether you're unemployed today -- or will be if the Tea Party Republicans take control of Congress -- you can help! The Tea Party Republicans may have the big money, but we have the people. Each of us can help by spending even a few hours calling voters or knocking on doors for Democrats who block the Tea Party Republican plans. 21st Century Democrats endorses candidates who share our vision of party and country, one that puts ordinary people first. To learn about our candidates, click here. You can help stand up Democrats all over the country, even if they are not in your community. You can make phone calls at no cost or make a small contribution. To contribute, click here. Will you work with us to protect jobs? All you need to do is click here. And we'll connect you with campaigns for stand up Democrats who need your help. Everyone can help. It doesn't matter if you're retired, unemployed, or still working. And share this invitation with friends and relatives, young people who haven't been able to find a job yet, retired people who are experienced volunteers and friends who ask "What can I do to stop the Tea Party Republicans?" Click here to work for jobs Sincerely, Jim Scheibel, Chair

Contact Information Phone: 202-626-5620 Website: 21st Century Democrats

Paid for by 21st Century Democrats 1133 19th Street, NW, 9th Floor Washington, D.C. 20036 (202) 736-5775 www.21stcenturydems.org Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

AFL-CIO goes in the field in 23 states

AFL-CIO goes in the field in 23 states   The AFL-CIO is launching the first stage of its field operation for November's elections, dropping more than 300,000 flyers at worksites in 23 states over the next two weeks. The effort, which is set to be announced this morning, is the start of what the union says will be an unprecedented effort in the 2010 campaign. "If politicians are fighting for working families, then we will work our hearts out for them," AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in a statement. "If they aren't delivering and think they can take our support for granted then they may be awfully lonely come November." Labor (including the AFL-CIO) has already made a huge splash this year by spending about $10 million trying to take down Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) in her primary. It came up just shy, but it insists there's more where that came from. According to copies of the flyers obtained by The Fix, some are negative and some are positive. They will focus on everything from governor and Senate races on down. One flyer hits Illinois GOP governor nominee Bill Brady for supporting lowering the minimum wage in his state to the federal level. Another focuses on California Republican Senate nominee Carly Fiorina's tenure as Hewlett Packard CEO, which included tens of thousands of layoffs and a "golden parachute" when she left. A positive piece for Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) lists the labor-friendly policies he has supported in the past. The states where the flyers are being distributed also include Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington and Wisconsin. Social Media Consulting, Web Presence, Call Center Technology, Text Messaging, Voice Broadcasts  Book A FREE 1/2 Hr. Phone Consultation

Soledad O'Brien on the New Direction of CNN's 'In America'

TVNewser stopped by the screening last night of CNN's new documentary hosted by Soledad O'Brien titled "Gary and Tony Have a Baby" (June 24, 8pmET). It's the latest from the "In America" department and represents a different direction for the series. The story follows a gay, NYC couple -- Gary and Tony, who were in attendance -- throughout the process... read more>>

Related articles by Zemanta

• CNN's Soledad O'Brien Sympathizes With Lesbian Teen's Plight (newsbusters.org)
• CNN Is Now Just Creating Programming to Give Bill Donohue a Chance to Sound Off (pinkbananaworld.com)

Majority Of States Would Support Same Sex Marraige

An analysis by Columbia University statisticians found a "generation-gap" on support for same-sex marriage that they called "huge." According to the nerds, "If policy were set by state-by-state majorities of those 65 or older, none would allow same-sex marriage. If policy were set by those under 30, only 12 states would not allow-same-sex marriage." Social Media Consulting, Web Presence, Call Center Technology, Text Messaging, Voice Broadcasts  Book A FREE 1/2 Hr. Phone Consultation

Joe Scarborough Has Been Lying For Mark Kirk For Years

Joe Scarborough has been wailing and failing for 2 weeks about Connecticut Attorney General

Richard Blumenthal

misstated his service During Viet Nam, yet has remained silent about his buddy Mark Kirk (R) IL

Appearing on the now-defunct MSNBC show Scarborough Country in August 2003, Kirk, a decorated intelligence officer, put it this way "I think I'm the only member of Congress that served on active duty during Operation Iraqi Freedom, and serving with my comrades in arms, both reserve and active duty, we are not in it for the money."

That left the host, former Rep. Joe Scarborough (R-FL) -- who briefly overlapped with Kirk in the House GOP caucus in 2001 -- with the wrong impression. "I want to ask you, if you'll keep coming back on Scarborough Country as a man who not only serves Americans in Congress, but also who served Americans overseas in Operation Iraqi Freedom," Scarborough said, closing out the segment uncorrected.

Write MSNBC and tell them to have Joe tell the truth

Letters to the MSNBC

Related articles by Zemanta

• IL-Sen: Mark Kirk has some explaining to do (dailykos.com)

Message From a GOP Propagandist

PA 12 Special: Only One Piece in Bigger Picture

By Stuart Rothenberg

Less than a day after the polls closed in the May 18 Pennsylvania special election, I left the country.

But e-mails followed me everywhere, and I read with some surprise the post-election assessments of the meaning of Democrat Mark Critz’s substantial victory over Republican Tim Burns in the race to succeed the late Rep. John Murtha (D).

I understand that we live in an era when exaggeration is the norm, but characterizing the GOP loss in that special election as evidence that Republicans can’t win the House is about as misguided as the pre-election assessments that the special was a “must win” for Republicans.

Critz’s victory was very welcome news for Democrats and a good reminder that candidates, campaigns and district fundamentals matter. Conservative Democrats, at this point in the cycle, can still win in conservative Democratic districts, even if President Barack Obama isn’t popular.

But while the result certainly ought to be a dose of humility for Republicans who have talked nonsensically about gaining 50, 60 or even 70 seats in November, the result in Pennsylvania wasn’t a game-changer.

From the time Republicans won the House in 1994 to their loss in the 2006 elections, the GOP never held Murtha’s district. Since that district wasn’t a “must win” for them then, it can’t possibly be regarded as one now.

The argument about whether Pennsylvania’s 12th is a swing district or a Democratic district obviously is important. Not surprisingly, the answer is somewhere in between the two alternatives.

Republican Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) carried the district very narrowly in 2008, and state Attorney General Tom Corbett (R) exceeded 50 percent of the vote there in his re-election that same year. Democratic Sen. John Kerry (Mass.) only squeezed by George W. Bush in the district in 2004, while then-Republican Sen. Arlen Specter carried the district (without winning a majority) in 2004. In other words, Republicans can run very competitively in the district, even winning it.

But at other times, the district’s Democratic heritage shows. Democrat Al Gore defeated Bush in the district in 2000 by a solid 11 points (54 percent to 43 percent), and Bill Clinton carried it comfortably twice.

More recently, 2009 state Supreme Court nominee Joan Orie Melvin (R), a western Pennsylvania native who won her race by an unexpectedly comfortable 8 points statewide and carried Chester, Delaware and Bucks counties in the southeastern corner of the state, drew only 48.5 percent of the vote in the 12th.

This is a picture of a narrowly Democratic district that moves toward the GOP when Republicans can establish a clear ideological contrast. When they can’t — and they didn’t last week — they don’t win.

Of course, the much ballyhooed “mood for change” should have boosted GOP prospects in the special election and given voters an opportunity to send a message of dissatisfaction to the president. They didn’t do that.

Did Critz win because the state’s competitive Senate primary pulled Democratic voters to the polls, or did the Congressional contest drive turnout? Partisans on both sides are certain of the answer, but I’m not. I remain agnostic about the question.

Critz’s victory boosts the prospects of moderate Democrats running in swing districts, whether in Western Pennsylvania, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula or nonurban Ohio.

But it doesn’t necessarily offer equally good news for Democratic Reps. Tom Perriello (Va.), Betsy Markey (Colo.), Steve Driehaus (Ohio), Mary Jo Kilroy (Ohio), Suzanne Kosmas (Fla.), Carol Shea-Porter (N.H.) or others who have cast votes that are unpopular back home.

And Critz’s victory doesn’t say anything about Democrats running in Republican-leaning districts or about districts with large numbers of independent voters, who are more likely to vote on mood than anything else.

As regular readers of this column know, election cycles develop over time, not overnight. In both 2006 and 2008, to say nothing of 1994, a number of races broke late, as voters turned their attention to the elections. I expect the same thing to happen this year, and that could change the arithmetic of the midterms.

There are dozens of reasons why the political environment might improve, or deteriorate, for Democrats between now and November — ranging from an improving employment picture or Republican stupidity to growing financial troubles in the European Union, political fallout for the administration from the BP oil disaster or a double-dip economic slowdown.

Some of these developments would help boost Obama’s standing and give Democratic candidates a better chance to localize their contests, while others would undermine the administration’s standing and create an even bigger wave for political change that would overwhelm many Democrats who run strong re-election campaigns.

Much has been made by some of Republican special election victories in Oklahoma and Kentucky prior to the 1994 midterms and of the Democrats’ win in Pennsylvania last week. But, unlike the one in Pennsylvania’s 12th, both of those 1994 specials occurred in districts that George H.W. Bush won comfortably in 1992 and overwhelmingly (by 60 percent) in 1988. The comparisons, in short, don’t hold.

It’s understandable that we all look for deep meaning from a single event. But with Election Day more than five months away, the die for November is not yet cast, no matter the results in Pennsylvania’s 12th district.

This column first appeared in Roll Call and on CQPolitics.com on May 27, 2010. 2010 © Roll Call Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

• Email to a friend • Article Search • Related •