John McCain used to be hot.

The New York Times has endorsed Hillary Clinton and John McCain for the Democratic and Republican nominations.

This passage from the McCain endorsement is sure to get the most press:

Why, as a New York-based paper, are we not backing Rudolph Giuliani? Why not choose the man we endorsed for re-election in 1997 after a first term in which he showed that a dirty, dangerous, supposedly ungovernable city could become clean, safe and orderly? What about the man who stood fast on Sept. 11, when others, including President Bush, went AWOL?

That man is not running for president.

The real Mr. Giuliani, whom many New Yorkers came to know and mistrust, is a narrow, obsessively secretive, vindictive man who saw no need to limit police power. Racial polarization was as much a legacy of his tenure as the rebirth of Times Square.

Mr. Giuliani’s arrogance and bad judgment are breathtaking. When he claims fiscal prudence, we remember how he ran through surpluses without a thought to the inevitable downturn and bequeathed huge deficits to his successor. He fired Police Commissioner William Bratton, the architect of the drop in crime, because he couldn’t share the limelight. He later gave the job to Bernard Kerik, who has now been indicted on fraud and corruption charges.

The Rudolph Giuliani of 2008 first shamelessly turned the horror of 9/11 into a lucrative business, with a secret client list, then exploited his city’s and the country’s nightmare to promote his presidential campaign.

I don’t think the Times like Rudy very much anymore.

By the way, here’s the paper’s 1997 endorsement of Giuliani for re-election as mayor.

So, McCain has won the South Carolina primary. As he said in his victory speech, it only took him eight years.

His win is pretty amazing when you consider his prospects last summer. In fact, I just found a New York Times article from exactly six months ago — July 19, 2007 — that presents a vastly different Republican race.

The decline of John McCain’s presidential campaign, and the rising profile of Fred D. Thompson as a prospective contender, are forcing candidates to rewrite their strategies as they adjust to a playing field vastly different from just one month ago…

The shifting strategies reflect a Republican campaign that remains in extraordinary flux, particularly compared with the Democratic field. In the space of a month, the party has witnessed not only the near-collapse of the campaign of Mr. McCain, once considered the party’s most formidable contender, but also the ascendancy in polls of Mr. Thompson, a former actor.

To confront a Thompson candidacy, Mr. Romney’s aides said they were adding to their forces in South Carolina, the state with the fourth nominating contest, in hopes of handing Mr. Thompson a decisive defeat in a state with a heavy conservative population and where he presumably has regional appeal…

Mr. Thompson’s advisers, saying they would speak only anonymously until their candidate gets into the race, confirmed that assessment, saying that Mr. Thompson intended to present himself as the most conservative candidate in the race and would go to South Carolina as part of his announcement swing….

In interviews, aides to the Republican candidates said they did not want to say or do anything — like poaching former McCain aides — that could offend Mr. McCain and complicate any effort to win his endorsement should he drop out of the race…

The article also mentions Rudy Giuliani several times. But it doesn’t mention Mike Huckabee at all.

How things change.

Maureen Dowd usually writes annoying faux- psychoanalytical columns, but she gets in some good jabs at Republicans who oppose allowing openly gay people in the military.

Be honest. Who would you rather share a foxhole with: a gay soldier or Mitt Romney?

A gay soldier, of course. In a dicey situation like that, you need someone steadfast who knows who he is and what he believes, even if he’s not allowed to say it out loud.

Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue, as the gloriously gay Oscar Wilde said. And gays are the sacrifice that hypocritical Republican candidates offer to placate “values” voters — even though some candidates are not so finicky about morals regarding their own affairs and divorces.

They may coo over the photo of Dick Cheney, whose re-election campaign demonized gays, proudly smiling with his new grandson, the first baby of his lesbian daughter, Mary.

But they’ll hold the line, by jiminy, against gay Americans who are willing to die or be horribly disfigured in the cursed Bush/Cheney war in Iraq.

Peter Pace, whose job as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff became a casualty of Iraq on Friday, asserted in March that homosexual acts “are immoral.” Yet in May, he wrote a letter to the judge in the Scooter Libby case, pleading for leniency for the Cheney aide. Scooter always looked for “the right way to proceed — both legally and morally,” General Pace wrote of the man who lied to a grand jury about the outing of a spy, after he pumped up the fake case for the war that has claimed the lives of 3,500 young men and women serving under the general.

At the G.O.P. debate in New Hampshire last week, the contenders were more homophobic than the mobsters on “The Sopranos,” unanimously supporting the inane “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Even Rudy Giuliani, who loves to cross-dress and who stayed with old friends, a gay couple, to avoid Gracie Mansion when his second marriage was disintegrating, had an antediluvian answer.

Wolf Blitzer asked him about the Arabic linguists trained by the government who have been ousted from the military after being outed.

Mr. Giuliani, who procured three deferments to avoid Vietnam, replied that, with the war in Iraq raging, “This is not the time to deal with disruptive issues like this.”

If he’s so concerned with disruptive issues, maybe he should start worrying about this one: Two straight guys who slithered out of going to Vietnam are devising a losing strategy in Iraq year after year. W. and Dick Cheney have fouled things up so badly that Robert Gates and Tony Snow are now pointing to South Korea — where American troops have stayed for over half a century — as a model.

Mitt Romney agreed with Rudy on the issue. Instead of going to Vietnam, Mr. Romney spent two and a half years doing Mormon missionary work in France. Isn’t that like doing Peace Corps work in Monte Carlo?

At the memorial for Mark Bingham, the gay 6-foot-5 rugby player who was on Flight 93 on 9/11, John McCain said he might owe his life to the young man who helped fight the hijackers, bringing down the plane aiming to crash into the Capitol.

But Senator McCain wants gay troops to stay closeted. The policy, he said, is “working.” But it’s not. The Army in Iraq is like that exhausted nag Scarlett O’Hara whipped on to Tara. Yet Republicans surge on, even as they expel gays.

In a Times Op-Ed piece Friday, Stephen Benjamin, a gay Arabic translator eager to go to Iraq, told how he was dismissed when the Navy learned his status. “Consider,” he wrote. “More than 58 Arabic linguists have been kicked out since ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ was instituted. How much valuable intelligence could those men and women be providing today to troops in harm’s way?”

He noted that 11,000 other service members have been shoved out since 1993 and speculated that if the Army had not been so short of Arabic translators, the cables that went untranslated on Sept. 10, 2001, might have been translated, preventing 9/11.

In 2000, the British military began letting anyone who served say if they were “a poof,” as one squadron leader put it. Sarah Lyall wrote in The Times that the military reports that none of its fears “about harassment, discord, blackmail, bullying or an erosion of unit cohesion or military effectiveness have come to pass.”

America has been Will-and-Graced since Bill Clinton had his kerfuffle on the issue in 1993. Tolerance has blossomed, especially among younger Americans. According to a Pew poll, 4-in-10 Americans say they have close friends or relatives who are gay.

The Republican field seems stale and out of sync. They should have listened to the inimitable Barry Goldwater, who told it true: You don’t have to be straight to shoot straight.

Rudy Giuliani, surprise surprise, has come out against New Hampshire’s new civil union law. [via Mike]

“Mayor Giuliani believes marriage is between one man and one woman. Domestic partnerships are the appropriate way to ensure that people are treated fairly,” the Giuliani campaign said in a written response to a question from the Sun. “In this specific case the law states same sex civil unions are the equivalent of marriage and recognizes same sex unions from outside states. This goes too far and Mayor Giuliani does not support it.”

What a hack. Is there anything he won’t say? Is there any member of the base he won’t pander to? First he flip-flops on abortion, then he goes all Karl Rove and says that a Democratic president will lead to another 9/11, and now this. He’s totally going into crazy base world.

Except for a few days in September 2001, Rudy Giuliani has always been an asshole. Here’s the real Rudy. New Yorkers had to put up with his crap for eight years. Had I been a New York City voter in the ’90s, I would, in fact, have voted for him – I liked his anti-crime policies, and the Disneyfication of Times Square doesn’t bother me. But back then, he was a northeastern, socially liberal Republican. Ever since he started believing his own 9/11 hype, he’s been bonkers.

What the hell does America see in him?

On the Mark Foley scandal and the Republican Congressional leadership, Andrew Sullivan writes:

There is something deeply sick about a Republican elite that is comfortable around gay people, dependent on gay people, staffed by gay people–and yet also rests on brutal exploitation of homophobia to win elections at the base. These public homophobes, just like the ones in the Vatican, may even tolerate gay misbehavior more readily than adjusted gay people do. If you treat gay sex in any form as a shameful secret to keep concealed, the line between adult, consensual contact and the sexual exploitation of the young may not seem so stark. That’s how someone like Speaker Dennis Hastert could have chosen not to know: He was already choosing not to know Foley was gay. In this way, Hastert is a milquetoast, secular version of Cardinal Bernard Law.

For non-New Republic registrants, I’ve posted the complete column after the jump. I’m skeptical of what he says about the Log Cabin Republicans, but other than that he makes some good points.

Continue reading →

Wouldn’t it be weird if George Allen won the Republican nomination for president in 2008 and Mark Warner won the Democratic nomination? We’d have two former governors of Virginia running against each other for the presidency.

While I’m talking about the 2008 election: Colonel Tigh always reminds me of John McCain.

Marshall Wittman, — John McCain’s former communications director, former member of the Christian Coalition, and self-described “Bull Moose” progressive — endorses John Kerry in a must-read, wide-ranging indictment of the Bush administration. He slams the leaders of the religious right; the attempt to repeal the estate tax; the Bush administration’s handling of Osama bin Laden, Afghanistan, and Iraq, its conduct during the 2002 mid-term elections, and its hypocrisy on “accountability”; and Bush’s lack of true conservatism. He says of Kerry:

Although I had my differences with Kerry during the Cold War, he has demonstrated by his hawkishness on Kosovo and Afghanistan that he is willing to use force to defend American ideas and interests. He advocates increasing the size of the U.S. military. On domestic issues, Kerry has positioned himself in the New Democrat tradition. Kerry has proposed an ambitious national service program. He would retain the tax cuts for the middle class while rolling them back on the super-rich. And he would reform, rather than eliminate, the estate tax.

. . .

Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have waged an unprecedentedly cynical and divisive campaign. The campaign has proven that there are no guard rails when it comes to a scorched-earth effort to hold on to power. However, Democrats can seize the opportunity to reach out to disaffected moderate Republicans and independents to build a new political coalition of national unity. That is both the hope and the cause of this unreconstructed Bull Moose.

It’s worth a read.

The Federal Marriage Amendment didn’t even come up for a vote. Only 48 senators voted for ending formal debate and putting the amendment up for a vote; 50 voted to block the amendment. (Kerry and Edwards were on the campaign trail.)

Republicans who voted to block the amendment: Susan M. Collins (Maine), Olympia J. Snowe (Maine), John E. Sununu (N.H.), Lincoln D. Chafee (R.I.), Ben Nighthorse Campbell (Colo.) and John McCain (Ariz.).

Democrats who voted to vote on the amendment: Zell Miller (Ga.), Ben Nelson (Neb.) and Robert C. Byrd (W.Va.). Boo on you. I don’t know why Zell Miller even bothers calling himself a Democrat anymore, seeing as how he’s speaking at the Republican National Convention. What a joke. At least he’s retiring.

Anyway, at least this is over, for now.

I received the following e-mail this morning:

********

DEFENDERS OF THE SANCTITY OF MARRIAGE

Ronald Reagan – divorced the mother of two of his children to marry Nancy Reagan, who bore him a daughter 7 months after the marriage.

Bob Dole – divorced the mother of his child, who had nursed him through the long recovery from his war wounds.

Newt Gingrich – divorced his wife who was dying of cancer.

Dick Armey – House Majority Leader – divorced.

Senator Phil Gramm of Texas – divorced.

Governor John Engler of Michigan – divorced.

Governor Pete Wilson of California – divorced.

George Will – divorced.

Senator Lauch Faircloth – divorced.

Rush Limbaugh – and his current wife, Marta, have six marriages and four divorces between them.

Senator Bob Barr of Georgia – not yet 50 years old, has been married three times. He had the audacity to author and push the “Defense of Marriage Act.” The current joke making the rounds on Capitol Hill is “Bob Barr – WHICH marriage are you defending?!?)

Senator Alfonse D’Amato of New York – divorced.

Senator John Warner of Virginia – once married to Liz Taylor.

Governor George Allen of Virginia – divorced.

Representative Helen Chenoweth of Idaho – divorced.

Senator John McCain of Arizona – divorced.

Representative John Kasich of Ohio – divorced.

Representative Susan Molinari of New York (Republican National Convention Keynote Speaker) – divorced.

********

This list seems unnecessarily partisan — they’re all Republicans. John Kerry and Bill Clinton should be on this list as well.

According to Salon.com’s Jake Tapper yesterday, Bush has been “stumbling in the polls like Jenna at a kegger.”

I love Salon.

I Will Surviv(or)

Yep, he’s blogging about “Survivor” again.

1) For those of you who watched it, wasn’t it weird how we watched the jurors cast their final votes, and then five minutes passed for us, but like five months had passed for them? And they’re all sitting there, still wearing the same clothes? It reminded me of the “Star Trek: The Next Generation” episode when the crew got stuck in a time loop. Pretty cool.

2) Although I thought Colby was going to win it, I was moved that Tina won. I always seem to root for the underdog. It was New Hampshire, and Tina was John McCain and Colby was George W. Bush. It was the 1998 Oscars, and Tina was “Shakespeare in Love” and Colby was “Saving Private Ryan.” It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was a dark and stormy night. It was…

3) Most heart-wrenching moment: Debb unsuccessfully trying not to break down on camera, talking about how this show has ruined her life and killed all of her self-worth. On the one hand, jeez, does the name Darva Conger ring a bell? On the other hand, what if it were you? What if you had shaky self-esteem to begin with, and then you were the very first person to be voted off the show, by a unanimous tribal vote? I’d feel like crap.

4) Most unexpectedly sexy: Mitchell, wearing those glasses. Mmm. And he lives so close to me.

I know there’s already been SurvivorBlog — two of them, in fact — but I was thinking about doing some sort of “gay blogging circuit” online Survivor thingy. Oh my god, wouldn’t that just be so disgustingly cliquish and exclusive-sounding and obnoxious and make people think there’s some A-List of gay bloggers and stir up resentment and create a big backlash? Anyway, it would be fun. I’m thinking I might just choose 16 gay bloggers/journalers and write up my own weekly episodes. People wouldn’t actually have to do anything, I’d just make up the narrative myself. I wonder if that would mean I wouldn’t be able to compete. Well, maybe I could be Jeff Probst. My name is Jeff, after all. Maybe it could be called “I Will Surviv(or).” Or probably something a little less awkward-sounding. I wonder what the tribes would be called? Anyway, I’m going to let my brain percolate about it.

Speaking of the gay blogging circuit, several of us are getting together tonight for drinks and stuff. What is it, eight of us? Sparky, RJ, Beau, Troy, myself, and some guys whom I’ve never met but look forward to meeting.

I can’t wait for the temperature to cool down tomorrow.