| Donna Brazile has a big mouth, and God bless her. Someone with a penchant for the outré remark is refreshing, in the button-down world of politics. But the fact is: George Bush did have a mistress, a State Department employee, IIRC; you may have to root around and look under a few rocks to find the details, but you can find them. The sexual activity of politicians is a subject that bores me.
It is part of the double standard of Washington that journalists, politicians, and rubes can obsess over Miss Semen-Stained Dress, but ignore the long-running hanky-panky of the likes of Bush, Henry Hyde (long-term mistress), Dan Burton (mistresses, drug-dealing son), Strom Thurmond (the dirtiest of Dirty Old Men), Newt Gingrich (about to marry his latest mistress: see Newt and Kirk), and many more than I have the stomach to look up right now.
I am the offspring of Republicans; I have followed the party, on and off, since the late 1960s, back in the days when you were still allowed to call yourself a "liberal Republican". (I were a wee lad, but dinner-table conversation can sometimes stick to your ribs). If you can remember Gary Franks, a black Republican congressman from Connecticut, or the career arcs of Reagan appointees like Clarence Thomas and Linda Chavez, maybe you, dannye, can understand where Ms. Brazile is coming from. There has been a tradition, over the past 20 years, for the GOP to promote minorities and women, even flaky and nondescript ones, in an attempt, over and over again, to show woman and minority voters "Hey! We're not the party of the Angry White Male! Honest!" Julius Caesar Watts and Colin Powell are two more-recent examples, though obviously Gen. Powell is substantial enough to be President of the United States. He may be the only one of the many people who have been "Franksed" over the years who was actually worth a damn. Chavez, the Latino Trophy of the Reagan years (and a "two-fer", being both a woman and a "minority"), couldn't even speak more than a couple of words of Spanish.
In other words, the party that thrives on distorting and demonizing the words "affirmative action" to please one segment of its voter base is also a prime practitioner of the worst kind of affirmative action. Go figure.
Please find another subject. | 
