President George W. Bush, the Great Divider, The Big Fat Liar?

Rich: Outing the Gay Old Party

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Published: Saturday October 14, 2006

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Frank Rich has taken aim at GOP hypocrisy regarding gays in his column in the Sunday New York Times.

Rich argues that Republicans employ gay staff members at the highest levels, yet they champion anti-gay measures, even while neglecting solutions for pressing issues of the . He points to the swearing-in on Tuesday of a high ranking gay State Department official, Mark Dybul: At the event, Secretary of State Condi Rice referred to Dybul's partner's mother as his "mother-in-law."

"Could wedding bells be far behind?" Rich asks snarkily.

Rich's "outing" takes a swipe at such staunch gay bashers as Sens. Rick Santorum, James Inhofe and Mel Martinez, all of whom have employed gay staff members in key positions.

Excerpts from the column:

If anything good has come out of the Foley scandal, it is surely this: The revelation that the political party fond of demonizing homosexuals each election year is as well-stocked with trusted and accomplished gay leaders as virtually every other power center in America. "What you're really seeing is the Republican Party on the Hill," says Rich Tafel, the former leader of the gay Log Cabin Republicans whom George W. Bush refused to meet with during the 2000 campaign. "Across the board gay people are in leadership positions." Yet it is this same party's congressional leadership that in 2006 did almost nothing about government spending, Iraq, immigration or ethics reform, but did drop everything to focus on a doomed constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

The split between the Republicans' outward homophobia and inner gayness isn't just hypocrisy; it's pathology. Take the bizarre case of Karl Rove. Every one of his Bush campaigns has been marked by a dirty dealing of the gay card, dating back to the lesbian whispers that pursued Ann Richards when Bush ousted her as Texas governor in 1994. Yet we now learn from "The Architect," the recent book by the Texas journalists James Moore and Wayne Slater, that Rove's own (and beloved) adoptive father, Louis Rove, was openly gay in the years before his death in 2004. This will be a future case study for psychiatric clinicians as well as historians.

So will Kirk Fordham, the former congressional aide who worked not only for Mark Foley but also for such gay-baiters as Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma (who gratuitously bragged this year that no one in his family's "recorded history" was gay) and Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida (who vilified his 2004 Republican primary opponent, a fellow conservative, as a tool of the "radical homosexual agenda"). Then again, even Rick Santorum, the Pennsylvania senator who brought up incest and "man-on-dog" sex while decrying same-sex marriage, has employed a gay director of communications. In the GOP such switch-hitting is as second nature as cutting taxes.

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SUBSCRIBERS TO TIMES SELECT CAN READ RICH'S COLUMN HERE.

The above found here on the web

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Conservatives Rally Against Bush Aide-Turned-Critic

Exposé of White House Scorn for Evangelicals Is Disputed

By Alan Cooperman

Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 14, 2006; Page A03

Conservative religious leaders described themselves as shocked yesterday by a new book's charge that Bush administration staffers privately dismissed evangelical Christian political activists as "nuts" and "goofy."

But their dismay was aimed at the book's author, former White House official David Kuo, rather than at President Bush or his senior advisers.

James Dobson, Charles W. Colson and other stalwarts of the conservative Christian movement defended the Bush administration and questioned the timing of the book's publication, a month before the midterm elections. Some suggested that Kuo had betrayed the White House.

"I feel sorry for him, because once you do something like this, you get your 15 minutes in the spotlight, but then after that nobody will touch you," said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, a Christian advocacy group in Washington. "These kiss-and-tell books do more damage to the author than to the people they attack."

Kuo, who was deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in Bush's first term, alleges in the book, "Tempting Faith," that the Bush administration used its funding of religious charities to court evangelical voters in Machiavellian fashion.

The book is being published at a pivotal moment not just for Republicans who are battling to maintain control of the House and Senate but also for conservative Christian voters, whose support for the GOP has dipped in recent polls.

At 7 p.m. Sunday, evangelical leaders including Perkins and Dobson plan to broadcast a 90-minute television special from a Boston church to hundreds of other churches across the country in an attempt to keep religious conservatives from sitting out the election.

Called "Liberty Sunday," it will "highlight specific cases and stories where people's religious liberties have been threatened because of homosexual activism and gay marriage in Massachusetts," said Family Research Council spokeswoman Bethanie Swendsen.

At the same hour, CBS's "60 Minutes" will broadcast the first interview with Kuo about his book, which is scheduled to go on sale Monday. CBS and the book's publisher, Simon & Schuster, tried to keep a lid on the book's contents until the "60 Minutes" exclusive. But MSNBC host Keith Olbermann obtained a copy and began broadcasting excerpts Wednesday.

Conservative Christian leaders as well as present and former White House officials responded yesterday to the MSNBC report, noting that they had not yet seen the book itself.

White House press secretary Tony Snow told reporters that the book's "assumption or insinuation seems to be that the administration takes lightly faith-based groups." That is "false," he said.

Asked whether the president's "faith-based initiative" was used for political purposes, Snow said flatly: "No." Snow also read from a letter Kuo wrote to Bush when he left the administration in December 2003, saying he was "proud of all the initiative has accomplished."

In the book, Kuo asserts that the faith-based office was hurriedly set up after Bush took office in 2001 by a transition volunteer who was given less than a week to roll out the initiative.

Kuo asserts that evangelical leaders were called "the nuts" by people in White House political strategist Karl Rove's office. "National Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person, and then were dismissed behind their backs and described as 'ridiculous,' 'out of control' and just plain 'goofy,' " the book says, according to MSNBC

Kuo previously has criticized the Bush administration for not carrying out the president's 2000 campaign promise to boost charitable giving at least $7 billion a year by extending charitable tax breaks to people who do not itemize income tax deductions.

In the book, he says the White House opted instead for cuts in the estate tax that eliminated the incentive for many wealthy people to make charitable donations. The "ultimate impact was to brutalize the very charities Mr. Bush once identified as his top priorities," Kuo says.

Beginning in 2002, the White House held ostensibly "nonpartisan" conferences about the availability of federal grants for religious charities. But Kuo alleges that the events were, in fact, designed to help vulnerable Republican incumbents.

Ken Mehlman, then the White House director of political affairs and now chairman of the Republican National Committee, "loved the idea and gave us our marching orders" to hold meetings in 20 congressional districts, the book says.

H. James Towey, who directed the faith-based office during Kuo's time there, said yesterday that "it sounds like he worked at a different White House than the one I worked for."

Towey added that he, not Mehlman, decided where to hold conferences. "If a congressman in a tight race invited me, I went," he said. "But that was true of Democrats as well as Republicans."

Dobson, the psychologist and radio host who heads the influential group Focus on the Family, issued a statement calling the book "a mix of sour grapes and political timing."

Colson, who founded Prison Fellowship Ministries, said he was "shocked and disappointed by what appears to be political timing to sell a book, and a very unfair characterization of the parties involved."

Jan LaRue, chief counsel of Concerned Women for America, a Christian women's group in Washington, said she sees "no reason to question the sincerity of this president" based on the accusations aired so far.

"So, in Rove's office people of faith are mocked? Well, who in Rove's office did the mocking? It's easy to make allegations like that if you don't give the name, date, time," she said.

Perkins of the Family Research Council said he would not be surprised if derisive comments were made behind Christian leaders' backs.

"I have no misconceptions about how people in the Republican Party and the establishment view social conservatives. They are dismissive. I see how they prefer to work with fiscal conservatives," he said. "Having said that, I see it really as a marriage of convenience. We are not without significant gains by working with this administration."

The above from the Washington Post, found here on the net