In my humble opinion, Tony Snow had as much — if not more — impact on the American political landscape as Tim Russert.  Both were kind, big-hearted family men with a unbridled passion for the country they lived in and tried to make a better place from their positions of influence. 

One was a life-long liberal (Russert) and received the lion’s share of fawning media coverage from the entire MSM establishment upon his death; the other a reformed liberal-turned-conservative (Snow) and the newspapers, cable networks and rest of the MSM nearly overlooked his passing this weekend.

But Tony Snow achieved something few others in American politics ever will — he was both in and out of journalism and was at the highest position of government public affairs:  White House Press Secretary.  Had cancer not taken him away from that job, I believe Snow would have re-set the standard for WH Press Secretary in the model of Jim Brady & Larry Speakes — and away from the Mike McCurry and Scott McClellan model.  I will leave you to compare the differences.

I once had dinner with Tony Snow.   He never knew it of course, as my table was next to his at a local hangout in Alexandria, VA called Bilbo Baggins.  But I remember feeling like I was in the company of a just a normal (and very tall!) guy and his wife and friends even though I knew he was one of the “biggies” in American journalism at the time.

The differences between Tim Russert and Tony Snow are many, including how the MSM handled each death much differently.  In my mind, a key difference is that we all probably completely understand what we lost in Russert’s premature death; but few people outside of the FOX family and those in the White House staff will fully appreciate what future void Tony Snow’s death is to our nation and its public discourse.

Tony Snow, RIP.

[RELATED STORY: The Character of Optimism - Bill Kristol, The New York Times]

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

I don’t remember when I first heard a gay leftist dismiss gay Republicans as self-loathing. It must have been about the time I first became active in Log Cabin when I lived in the Washington, D.C.-area in the mid-1990s. I do recall some activist badmouthing me for my allegedly hypocritical and closeted life about the same time I would be addressing a large public gathering of Northern Virginia Republicans as an openly gay man.

These angry critics don’t even consider the facts before leveling their accusations. When Bruce broke the news of Log Cabin President Patrick Sammon’s meeting with presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain, we were subject yet again to the charge, with no less than a Professor of Psychology calling “self-loathing” any gay person who votes Republican. Seems like someone needs his head — and prejudices — examined.

I wonder if that professor ever met a gay Republican or even bothered to consider why someone might cast a ballot for a candidate (or party) he doesn’t support. He never explained why he finds us “self-loathing.” None of them do, but they hurl the insult so readily as if by rote. But, I digress.

Recently, on a date gone awry, I was exposed to real gay self-hatred. We had met for lunch at a public place, a more relaxed setting, I thought. A mid-day meeting would make clear this was about getting acquainted and not about getting laid.

While he was a nice enough guy, we really didn’t connect on a deep level and he kept insisting we return to my car so we could drive to some secluded place and “get it on.” I refused to even tell him where I parked. As we concluded our time together, I moved to give him a hug good-bye. He pushed me away, whispering “not in a public place.”

As i drove away, it struck me that there was an example of real gay self-hatred, someone eager to fill the gaps in a first meeting with sex, yet unwilling to acknowledge publicly the nature of his feelings for men.

Sometimes, I wonder if it’s more than that, that self-hatred is not just limited to people who would publicly deny their feelings. It also includes those who see their sex partners as nothing more that objects to help them fulfill their desires, refusing to look beyond the surface attraction to discover the human being beneath.

Real gay self-hatred is thus not being able to connect one’s deeper feelings to one’s identity as a human being.

This morning, while surfing the web, I chanced on yet another piece on a left-wing site attacking gay Republicans. This writer, the Huffington Post’s Gene Stone, must have thought himself particularly clever when he came up with the title for his April 2006 post, The Gay Republican: Oxymoron, or Just Moron?. But, all he really did was prove himself yet another liberal looking at gay Republicans and/or conservatives and insulting us without taking one moment to understand us. A man who prefers name-calling to thought or research.

Like Charles Kaiser, he just didn’t bother to contact any gay Republicans before writing his piece. Well, maybe he did, he just didn’t quote them in his 700-word diatribe. He makes some pretty sweeping generalizations and some pretty particular accusations such as “state republican (sic) parties have specifically told gay men and women they are not welcome in the party.” Um, Gene, could you please provide those specifics.

About the only piece of actual “evidence” he provides for Republican gay-bashing is that former New York City Mayor was “campaigning for arch-homophobes” as if the candidates in question (then Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum and 2006 Iowa GOP gubernatorial hopeful) had defined their entire political career by their animosity toward gay people, as if Rudy was campaigning for them precisely because they did not vote the way HRC wanted them to.

So he asks what he terms “the old question:”

Why would any gay man or woman belong to a party that has stated, over and over, as clearly as can be, without equivocation, that he or she is not welcome.

He provides no evidence whatsoever that the party has stated “over and over” in his view has told us we’re not welcome. Nor does he bother to consult any gay man or woman who belong to the party he so unfairly and inaccurately demonizes.

And that’s the point of this post. Those who harbor an animosity toward gay Republicans base their animosity not on the ideas and experiences of actual gay Republicans, but on their narrow view of Republican party.

Stone answers his “old question” instead by considering his own anti-Republican prejudices. To be sure, he doesn’t call them that. What liberal would admit to prejudice? Given the inaccurate picture he paints of the GOP, it’s clear harbors strong anti-Republican prejudices.

(more…)

Before even checking our sitemeter, I knew we must’ve gotten another link from a left-wing blog when I was reviewing the comments caught in our spam filter. We had received an unusual number of hate-filled reactions to Bruce’s piece yesterday, Myrick, Knollenberg Want Action Taken Against Carter. Yup, checked the sitemeter, lots of links coming in from TBogg.

What is it about certain left-wingers that they can only address the subject of gay conservatives with bile and bitterness?

I recall last fall when some left-of-center blog linked my piece on media disinterest in the anti-conservative attitude of gays and we received such a welter of angry and apoplectic comments, I was delighted to post a follow-up piece on the reactions. (Reviewing them, I laughed as hard as I normally do when watching a Monty Python sketch.)

And now Bruce’s piece on Republican Congressmen standing up to Jimmy Carter’s visits with America’s enemies gets the dander of angry left-wingers up again. But, they just repeat the same tired, old clichés we gay conservatives have been hearing almost since the first moment we came out (as conservatives) in gay circles or when we dared defend Republicans in liberal circles where we came out (as gay).

While our situation allows us to see more readily left-wing narrow-mindedness, it also gives us an opportunity to more readily ascertain the character of the individuals we meet. I mean, if they react with angry opprobrium to our unique combination of politics and sexuality, we know them to be either incredibly intolerant and short-sighted or just amazingly **amazingly** insecure.

(more…)

The hypocrisy of the gay left never ceases to amaze me.

Just yesterday, I wondered at the eagerness of gay activists to support Barack Obama although he had welcomed the support of anti-gay singer Donnie McClurkin. Later, I read that Dave Noble, Director of Policy & Government Affairs for National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Action Fund (NGLTF), had called on Republican presidential nominee John McCain to reject the endorsement of Rev. John Hagee because that clergyman blamed gay people for Hurricane Katrina.

Did Mr. Noble ask Senator Obama to reject the endorsement of McClurkin or to apologize for not appearing in a picture with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom? (A few google searches turned up no such statement.)

Noble writes:

There was widespread disgust when Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson blamed LGBT people for the Sept. 11 attacks. Yet more than six years later, John McCain is still embracing leaders who make these sorts of wild claims. A media concerned with the truth about who John McCain is and what he truly stands for should hold him accountable and ask tough questions about why he’s proud to accept this endorsement.

Well, McCain never made any of the wild claims that Noble attributes to Hagee (or the late Reverend Falwell). But, I’m wondering why, given Senator Obama’s record, Noble hasn’t asked why a media concerned with the truth about who Barack Obama is and what he truly stands for should hold him accountable and ask tough questions about why he’s proud to accept Donnie McClurkin’s endorsement.

But, then again, to the gay left, only Republicans deserve such scrutiny and should be held accountable for the crazy statements made by those who endorse them.

UPDATE: In an essay on retiring NGLTF Exective Director Matt Foreman’s legacy, Jamie Kirchick, an assistant editor at the New Republic gets at the roots of his organization’s apparent hypocrisy, its “conflation of liberalism with the very notion of gay rights itself:”

It’s a garden-variety liberal interest group posing as a gay rights organization . . . [where] the battle for gay rights suddenly becomes part and parcel of the battle to redistribute wealth, weaken American sovereignty by making the United States subservient to the whims of the United Nations, and mandating racial quotas. In this vision of the world, the fight for gay rights is inseparable from the campaign to, say, oppose welfare reform.

While he is too kind to HRC and the Gill Action Fund in his concluding paragraph, Jamie wrote a solid piece and I encourage you to read the whole thing!

Welcome Instapundit Readers!!

Back when I was in law school and Rush Limbaugh published his first book, I walked into my favorite bookstore in Charlottesville to pick up a book I had ordered (this was before amazon) and took note of a sign behind the counter saying something like, “We don’t carry Rush Limbaugh’s book, so don’t even ask.”

Obviously some people had asked. And that irritated the store’s owner.

I made some comment to the clerk, indicating that while I respected the store’s right to stock whichever books it pleased, I also had the right to go elsewhere to buy my books. His refusal to carry Rush’s book decreased the likelihood I would return to that store. The clerk observed that I had not been the first to make such a comment.

I had wanted to support the Williams Corner Bookstore, an independent bookseller on the downtown mall. It was a great place to take a break from my legal studies and browse for books. I appreciated their literature section. But, it troubled me that they would exclude the book of a prominent conservative while including many tomes by left-wing scholars, activists and hangers-on.

When a Barnes & Noble opened up in the Barracks Road Shopping Center, I took my business there.

The owner, Michael Williams, may have blamed such superstore competition for putting him out of business in 1998, calling his rivals “Gangsters,” but I also wonder if his own bias also hurt his business.

I thought of the Williams Corner Bookstore’s demise when I read this weekend on Instapundit that some Barnes and Noble’s stores were not carrying (or hiding) Jonah Goldberg’s new book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. Impressed that my local Barnes & Noble bookstore almost always includes a diverse array of books on its display tables (& shelves), I had intended to buy it there. But, after what I learned on Instapundit, I decided to order the book from amazon instead.

While I respect the right of any bookseller to refuse to carry certain books, we book-buyers also have the right to choose where we buy our books. Back in the 1990s, Michael Williams’s public statement that he wasn’t carrying Rush Limbaugh’s book caused him to lose a regular customer, a conservative law student who happened to frequent his establishment when looking for books in any number of categories.

And it’s pretty clear I wasn’t the only customer he lost.

The more bias booksellers show, the more customers will seek out other means of buying books. And with new technologies, we have more places to get our books.

Oftentimes, independent booksellers blame the big chains for driving them out of business. That’s only half the story. As the chain bookstores proliferate, I have tried to support independent booksellers, but have found often them staffed with rude or snooty clerks and biased owners like Charlottesville’s Michael Williams.

I would dare say that those independent booksellers which survive understand the importance of customer service — and of maintaining a broad and diverse selection of books.

I love these. Hat tip goes to Dan (GPW) and VdaK for sending me this posting.

Here is just a taste of RightWingNews’ Top 40 Most Obnoxious Quotes: (READ THE WHOLE THING!)

40) “(I have) a wide stance when going to the bathroom.” — Republican Senator Larry Craig tries to explain away his attempt to pick-up an under cover police officer in an airport bathroom

33) “I do believe that it’s the first time in history that fire has ever melted steel. I do believe that it defies physics that World Trade Center tower 7 — building 7, which collapsed in on itself — it is impossible for a building to fall the way it fell without explosives being involved. World Trade Center 7. World Trade [Center] 1 and 2 got hit by planes — 7, miraculously, the first time in history, steel was melted by fire. It is physically impossible.” — Rosie O’Donnell talks Trutherism

27) “Is there such a thing as a man-made stroke? In other words, did someone do this to (Democratic Senator Tim Johnson)? …I know what this [Republican] party is capable of.” — Joy Behar on The View

25) “When I see a stroller now, I see it as someone who evicted a person with AIDS, right or wrong.” — Brian Basinger, president of the Harvey Milk Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transsexual Democratic Club on the horror of having to live near heterosexual families in San Francisco.

19) “I propose a limitation be put on how many sqares [sic] of toilet paper can be used in any one sitting. Now, I don’t want to rob any law-abiding American of his or her God-given rights, but I think we are an industrious enough people that we can make it work with only one square per restroom visit, except, of course, on those pesky occasions where 2 to 3 could be required.” — Sheryl Crow at the Huffington Post

18) “Now I believe, myself, that the secretary of state, the secretary of defense and you have to make your own decision as to what the president knows: that this war is lost, that the surge is not accomplishing anything.” — Democratic Senator Majority Leader, Harry Reid

16) “Al Qaeda really hurt us, but not as much as Rupert Murdoch has hurt us, particularly in the case of Fox News. Fox News is worse than Al Qaeda — worse for our society. It’s as dangerous as the Ku Klux Klan ever was.” — MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann

12) “I have zero doubt that if Dick Cheney was not in power, people wouldn’t be dying needlessly tomorrow….I’m just saying if he did die, other people, more people would live. That’s a fact.” — Bill Maher

1) “Over time, however, the endless war in Iraq began to play a role in natural selection. Only idiots signed up; only idiots died. Back home, the average I.Q. soared.” — Ted Rall

Ignorance, malice and Bush Derangement Syndrome on full display from all corners in 2007.

HAPPY 2008!

Every now and again, we got a comment which defines an attitude. But, it’s rare that that commenter will keep posting, continually proving how narrow-minded was his initial point about our blog, how wrong he was about our ideas and how ignorant he was about gay Republicans.

But, yesterday, not long after I announced that we were opening up nominations for our annual competition to determine the Grande Conservative Blogress Diva, reader John Santos claimed that “all those women” (emphasis added) that we were considering “have at least one anti-gay post on their blogs.” Amused by the ignorance of his statement, I chimed in in his comment asking him to back up his point with actual links.

Something which should be easy given that he had claimed that every single one of these blogresses had posted at least one anti-gay piece.

To be sure, I haven’t read every single post of every single woman I listed. I try to read a few of them regularly. That list includes blogresses whose work I (or Bruce) had read (and admired) at one time or another as well as blogresses whom readers had recommended when we held this competition in past years.

Perhaps, one of them had said something anti-gay–and that post escaped my notice. But, I highly doubt that “all of the women” had posted an anti-gay piece. Several blogresses (on our list) have libertarian leanings. One (Tammy Bruce) is an open lesbian, another has not only become a friend (Bridget Johnson of GOP Vixen), but she also regularly socializes with gay men while several others who have, from time to time, been critical of social conservatives for their extreme stands on homosexuality. I have met at least three others on the list, having identified myself to each as GayPatriotWest. None reacted adversely to this information.

When I challenged Mr. Santos to back up his point with links, he came up with only one, but in that post, Kate (the blogress with the supposed anti-gay comment) only weighed in on the fury of a transgender activist scorned. That activist got upset at the publication of a book nominated for an award by the Lambda Literary Foundation, a foundation which defines itself as “the country’s leading organization for LGBT literature.” Doesn’t sound like an anti-gay group to me.

In eighteen (18) comments posted after my challenge, Santos refused to provide a single post where a single one of the blogresses mentioned in the post made (as he claimed they all did) anti-gay comments.

Upon reading the post, Santos made an assumption about the women we gay conservatives choose to honor. Assuming (as do all too many in our community) we are self-hating hypocrites, this man is certain that we admire anti-gay women.

This man’s not interested in engaging our ideas, but in proving to himself that we are as narrow as he imagines us to be. Only, I–and a number of our regular defenders–fought back, taking issue with his ludicrous claim. Not only that, his failure to provide any examples supporting his point shows that he did not base his assumption on the reality of the situation. He just threw out a statement. Were that statement even close to true, he could have (in a matter of moments) come up with several examples.

What is it about all too many of those who spend so much time on this site that they repeatedly misunderstand our ideas, our arguments, even our rationale for supporting a party which, alas, still promotes policies (on gay issues) that we oppose? I do try to make rational arguments and know that from some of the comments (as well as some of my e-mail) that some liberals do get my points and appreciate (even while not supporting) my commitment to the GOP.

It’s too bad that others don’t take the time these people do to understand the arguments of their ideological adversaries.

All that said, perhaps someone will track down an anti-gay post one of these blogresses has written of which I am (at present) not aware. Such a post would surely lower my regard my regard for the blogress who penned it.

Having read a number of them regularly and others occasionally, I doubt any reader will come up with anything so incriminating. For most of these women appear to be supportive of rather than antagonistic to gay people.

- B. Daniel Blatt (GayPatriotWest@aol.com)

Just read an e-mail from a reader linking me to a piece an e-mail David Horowitz received and posted from a gay reader. In that missive, M offers a view on Andrew Sullivan’s shift to the left near identical to my own, that he did so for social reasons. That one-time conservative had grown tired of being ostracized in the gay community for his political views so he adopted the views of the gay “political milieu” “in order to maintain both friends and sex partners,” commenting:

I know this sounds crude, simplistic, and mean-spirited, but frankly it is the only plausible explanation I can think of. I made the decision long ago to wear the scorn of such people as a badge of honor. I was virtually excommunicated from the gay “community” years ago for my conservative political views, and have been quite content to associate with my fellow thinkers, regardless of their sexual orientation. Needless to say, VERY few of them are gay.

Sounds like this guy has experienced something similar to what a number of our readers (and even yours truly) has experienced.

I wonder if he reads this blog.

Sometimes, I’ll put days of thought and hours of work into a post, thinking I’m addressing an important issue and get no links and only a handful of comments. Most people didn’t find take as much interest in the idea that I found so compelling. Other times, I’ll read some post (or encounter an idea) in an e-mail and, on a whim, whip off a piece.

Such was the case yesterday when I pondered an e-mail from a reader referencing Michelle Malkin’s on ABC “staging” news by hiring actors to engage in PDA to provoke a reaction from people in Alabama. And I wondered about the MSM’s disinterest in something we gay conservatives encounter frequently when we come out to our peers, an intolerant reaction from our fellow gays.

After whipping off the post, I went out to run some errands. I didn’t think anyone (beyond our regular readers) would be particularly interested in the piece. I mean, I didn’t even send an e-mail out to other bloggers, alerting them to the piece. But no sooner did I post it than Pajamas picked it up, then did some relatively high-traffic left-wing blog (of which I had theretofore been unaware). Before I knew it, we were inundated with comments, many of which I had to review in our spam filter.

Talk about hate speech.

It was amazing reading through those comments. It seemed half the people hadn’t even read the post, limiting themselves to responding to what the blogger linking us had said while the other half focused on my anecdote about the date. Hardly the point of the post, just an illustration of my idea.

And then when I read the comments to their post!! WOW! So much fun! Almost grateful for the misrepresentations and projection. And the repetition of empty soundbytes and stock phrases about our self-hatred! It provided a window into their worldview. This time it seems Ann Coulter got something right. These people weren’t interested in argument, but in “anathematiz[ing] their enemies.”

Most (but not all) of those commenting had absolutely no understanding of the modern conservative movement, seeing it instead through the narrow lens of the mainstream media and left-wing blogs.

Despite the meanness of many of the comments, this experience did provide much amusement. I could not help but smile as I read (and occasionally chimed in) the various comments, all too many confirming Coulter’s observation while showing their total misunderstanding of ideas and individuals they claim to abhor. (No wonder I woke in such a good mood even though I did not get as much sleep as I would have liked.)

And I wondered. . . . what does it say about these people that they so revile something they don’t even understand and repeatedly misrepresent? It is that they merely need find an outlet to express their bile? Kind of like someone lashing out at the first person he meets after being stuck in traffic for several hours?

I’m not sure what it is. But, it does give food for thought. I’ve asked it before and wonder yet again: Why do they hate so?

(This post ended up going in an entirely different direction than the one I intended when I started writing it. Funny, how I often struggle to find a good beginning for expresssing an idea and then that opening leads me to explore another idea altogether. Ah! How much fun blogging is.

In other words, there were a couple of issues I had intended to explore in this post, but didn’t get to. So, I decided to limit this post to the idea above on the hatred and misunderstanding of some of our ideological adversaries. I had intended to expand upon the point I made in comment 71, reflecting an insight EssEm offered in comment 69. I hope to do that in a subsequent post. And come to think of it, given that would deal with some broad-minded liberals, it would make a nice companion piece to this one.)

In my post yesterday, I expressed my reluctance at taking a stand I know to be controversial in the gay community. We gay conservatives are all too familiar with the hostility we experience when we come out to our supposedly tolerant fellows.

I was once introduced to a guy who, after hearing me express my passion for mythology and my love for movies, was proposing to me before we even met. And while he acknowledged finding me attractive when we did meet in person, he e-mailed me to say he couldn’t “get past” my politics, describing the current administration as evil and refusing to understand how “anyone with any intelligence or compassion” could support even an iota of support for “its ideology.”

He, like so many others, dismissed my ideas offhand. Even as he acknowledged my intelligence, he refused even to listen to my arguments. Based entirely on our political differences, he closed off any possibility of friendship, much less romance. After receiving the e-mail I excerpted above, I never heard from him again.

And while many of us gay conservatives have developed strong friendships, even romantic relationships, with our ideological adversaries, nearly every gay conservative I have met (or with whom I have corresponded) has experienced a situation similar to the one I described above, where someone who has initially expressed interest in us, won’t let themselves “get past” our politics.

It’s not just in relationships we experience this. When we go out into the gay world and come out as conservatives, we face insults, ridicule, derision and rejection.

Yet, the mainstream media doesn’t seem much interested in the mean-spirited anti-Republican intolerance of all too many gays. It doesn’t fit their narrative of the way the world works. Instead, they want to show how intolerant many Southerners are of gays. And while such intolerance may well exist, it might be more interesting if some news network actually looked at both “red-state” attitudes toward gays and gay attitudes toward conservatives and religious Christians. Such a program might allow people to compare the attitudes and see that social conservatives do not have a monopoly on intolerance.

Michelle Malkin reported earlier this week, ABC News is staging an “experiment” in Alabama hiring actors to portray same-sex couples publicly displaying affection. She says this experiment has earned the network’s news division a new motto: “All the news that’s fit to stage.“

Perhaps, the network should hire a few actors to wear pro-Republican T-shirts and walk through central West Hollywood to see the reaction they might earn. Heck, I’d be willing to do that and I wouldn’t even need to act.

Or maybe I could just conduct that experiment myself. Let’s see how much it would cost to get a Republican T-shirt and buy a videocamera. . . . That could actually be a learning experience for me in more way than one — as I could finally figure out how to post video on the web.

First, there are a lot of caveats in that headline.  Second, I’m surprised they could narrow it down to 10.  Third, I hate to have been the researcher that had to do it…. they must have been poring through every minute of tape and newsprint since 1997 so they didn’t miss anything.  After all, the outrageous lies from the “Mainstream Media” are now hourly occurrences.

In any ase, for what its worth, here are just a few of the list of Top 10 Outrageous Liberal Media Quotes Over the Past 20 Years as complied by the Media Research Center.

#1 - Reviling Ronald Reagan:  “In the plague years of the 1980s — that low decade of denial, indifference, hostility, opportunism and idiocy — government fiddled and medicine diddled, and the media were silent or hysterical. A gerontocratic Ronald Reagan took this [AIDS] plague less seriously than Gerald Ford had taken swine flu. After all, he didn’t need the ghettos and he didn’t want the gays.”– CBS’s John Leonard on “Sunday Morning,” Sept. 5, 1993.

#3 - Typical Liberal Compassion:  “I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he dies early like many black men do, of heart disease…. He is an absolutely reprehensible person.” — USA Today columnist and Pacifica Radio talk show host Julianne Malveaux on Justice Clarence Thomas, Nov. 4, 1994, on PBS’s “To the Contrary.”

#6 - Talk Radio Terrorists:  “The bombing in Oklahoma City has focused renewed attention on the rhetoric that’s been coming from the right and those who cater to angry white men…. Right-wing talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Bob Grant, Oliver North, G. Gordon Liddy, Michael Reagan and others take to the air every day with basically the same format: Detail a problem, blame the government or a group and invite invective from like-minded people…. Never do most of the radio hosts encourage outright violence, but the extent to which their attitudes may embolden or encourage some extremists has clearly become an issue.” — Bryant Gumbel, co-host of NBC’s “Today Show,” April 25, 1995.

#10 - Rosie vs. Radical Christianity:  “As a result of the [9/11] attack and the killing of nearly 3,000 innocent people, we invaded two countries and killed innocent people in their countries…. Radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America.” — Rosie O’Donnell on ABC’s “The View,” Sept. 12, 2006.

You can’t make this stuff up.  Liberal Media Elitists truly do speak for themselves. 

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

The more I read about the manufactured outrage of the left against Rush Limbaugh for allegedly smearing the troops by calling some critics of the war “phony soldiers,” the more I realize how great is their smear of this outspoken conservative. As Christopher G. Adamo put it on The American Thinker, “Limbaugh’s attackers have intentionally mischaracterized his criticism of such individuals as an assault the U.S. armed forces, asserting that he derided any troops who oppose the war as ‘phony soldiers’” (Via Instapundit).

Rush made very clear the “soldiers” he was calling phony in the very radio program where he first uttered the expression. ABC had just aired a special on phony soldiers with which the talk show host was familiar. Byron York observes:

The fact that Limbaugh, on the original September 26 program, brought up the ABC report, unbidden, to explain the “phony soldiers” remark suggests that that indeed was what he had in mind at the time he said it. That’s also supported by the fact that he had recorded a commentary on the story the day before, and that he printed out and re-read that commentary on September 26 as he explained “phony soldiers.” It was clearly on his mind.

Let me repeat, that expression was clearly on Rush’s mind when one soldier called it to deride the media for selecting troops “who come up out of the blue.”

Within moments of uttering it, he made clear that he was referring to individuals like Jesse Macbeth who invented stories out of whole cloth but which fit the anti-war movement’s narrative of our mission in Iraq. Many of Rush’s critics make much of the fact that there was a two-minute delay between Rush’s first uttering the expression, “phony soldiers” and his clarification.

Perhaps in that time, Rush realized how others would spin his mark. For when he uttered it, it was just an expression that was on his mind. Importantly, as York put it, the talk show host brought up the ABC report “unbidden,” mentioning Macbeth’s name long before Media Matters accused him of sliming troops who support withdrawal.

But, Limbaugh’s critics won’t be assuaged. They believe they know what that conservative was thinking better than he does. As Tom Maguire puts it:

Limbaugh’s critics are certain that he could not possibly have had that in mind when he mentioned “phony soldiers”, even though the caller was alluding to soldiers that “come up out of the blue” and even though Limbaugh went on to cite a specific phony soldier, Jesse MacBeth, two minutes later?

The critics focus on the two-minute gap as if it means everything. And Media Matters doesn’t even include the references to Jesse Macbeth on its audio clip of Rush’s show.

Despite all this, Democrats continue to misrepresent Rush’s remarks, attacking a straw man of their own creation. But, we gay Republicans are all too familiar with such misrepresentations, people who define us not as we are, but as they wish we were. Maybe this incident will make that broadcaster more sympathetic to our situation.

Even without his support, we’ll manage just fine.

In the end, all this really shows is how far some on the left will go to denounce their ideological adversaries. They’re not interested in an honest discussion, but in undermining any conservative who gain a popular following.

I wonder if their continually misrepresention of those who challenge them is a sign of insecurity about their own ideas.