Guilty (6 page)

MSNBC's Chris Matthews opened his
Hardball
program on August 28, 2007, “The big story tonight, dirty politics. Idaho senator Larry Craig, cultural warrior of the right, stands naked tonight, exposed as
both a sexual deviant and a world-class hypocrite.”
⁵⁴
Normally, using the word “deviant” in reference to a gay person would be a linguistic offense worse than calling college basketball players “nappy-headed hos,” but fortunately for Matthews, no one watches
Hardball.

Naturally, the media claimed that Larry Craig was a hypocrite because he opposed gay marriage—and yet he propositioned an undercover cop in a public bathroom! Hypocrite!

But unless Craig proposed marriage to the undercover cop in the airport bathroom, I'm not seeing the hypocrisy. If Democrats were claiming that Craig was simply a bad person—but not a hypocrite—for living in a sham marriage for political gain, I note that Democrats voted for someone with those credentials for president in 1992 and 1996.

The Craig disorderly conduct charge also allowed
Newsweek
'
s
Jonathan Alter to resurrect a long-ago-disproved hoax sex scandal out of Ohio. Claiming that the “conservative-hypocrisy angle goes way back,” Alter cited “the Franklin child-sex ring, which ensnared more than a dozen officials in the Reagan and first Bush administrations.”
⁵⁵
It was odd that the rest of the mainstream media had failed to take note of a “child-sex ring” involving “more than a dozen officials in the Reagan and first Bush administrations,” but since
Newsweek
tries to pass off Alter as a serious journalist, this required a quick Nexis check.

The “Franklin child-abuse sex scandal” grew out of a 1988 federal embezzlement investigation of Lawrence King, manager of the Franklin Community Federal Credit Union, in Omaha. This was in the midst of the child sex-abuse hysteria of the 1980s, so naturally, state and federal investigators were soon investigating child sex-abuse charges that somehow involved the embezzled money. According to the
New York Times,
two teenagers alleged that as foster children, they had been flown to hotels around the country where they participated in sex orgies attended by prominent Republicans. One teenager claimed she was forced to stand naked in the middle of a party and auctioned off as a sex slave to the highest bidder. A “child care specialist” began telling reporters that one teenager described a party that involved sex between “more than two people, same sex and opposite sex.”
⁵⁶

Granting that teenagers tend to exaggerate, what part of that story
could possibly have been true? Even the
Times
must have smelled a rat, because after one story mentioning the investigation, there were no further articles on foster child sex orgies until July 1990, when the
Times
reported that the story was a hoax. “Lurid reports of child sex abuse, drug trafficking, pornography and political intrigue that have held Omaha enthralled for nearly two years,” the
Times
article began, “were a ‘carefully crafted hoax,' a county grand jury in Nebraska has concluded.”
⁵⁷

The two teenagers who concocted the story were indicted for perjury by the grand jury, and two months later a federal grand jury reached the same conclusion and indicted one of the same two accusers on eight counts of perjury.
⁵⁸

That was “the Franklin child-sex ring” that Jonathan Alter dramatically rolled out in 2007 to prove Republican “hypocrisy” on family values. Alter's next exposé on Republican hypocrisy on sex? Tawana Brawley! Didn't Brawley accuse a Republican prosecutor of raping her? And how about the Duke lacrosse case? Some of the falsely accused Duke lacrosse players must have been Republicans. This was the equivalent of a column on the mendacity of the Jews that cited the Dreyfus case as proof.

Inasmuch as Alter surely has all back issues in the
New York Times
carefully filed in plastic folders, it appears that he intentionally cited bogus information in a deliberate attempt to reintroduce a hoax into the public bloodstream. At least Dan Rather was actually stupid. Alter's invocation of “the Franklin child-sex ring” may be the most vile lie ever spread by the establishment media. No right-wing radio host has ever propagated such a fraud.

On the bright side, at least his lie appeared only in the pages of
Newsweek
(circulation: 1,123). If Alter were any less physically repellent, he might have said it on TV, and millions more people could have been hoodwinked by this farce.

Meanwhile, just a few years ago, there was a sex story about Bill Clinton that turned out to be true, but it was killed by a magazine called—HEY! That magazine was called
“Newsweek”
too!

To be fair, in the “Franklin child-sex ring” article, Alter did not rest his case on the hoax scandal. He also cited two gay Republicans exposed
in sex scandals a quarter-century earlier. One was a one-term representative from Mississippi, Jon Hinson—yes,
that
Jon Hinson—and the other was the great Maryland Republican Bob Bauman. Alter called Bauman “arguably the single most anti-gay and sanctimonious right-winger in town”—which is liberal-speak for “conservative.” Bauman was in fact a strong social conservative who promoted family values. Only liberals consider it offensive for a gay person to have strong morals.

Correction: Earlier in this chapter, in comments on Frank Rich, I was operating under the impression that Rich is gay and castigated him for sneering at gay men. Based on Rich's speaking style and manner, I simply assumed that he was gay, just as I assume that Little Richard is gay. Apparently he is not, and although I consider it a matter of indifference, I apologize if there was any offense taken. In my defense, I submit any video of Frank Rich talking on TV. I insist on an all-black jury.

IT's A PERVERSE WORLD WHEN THE MOST AGGRESSIVE PEOPLE are always wailing about their victimhood. In what other place or time have people boasted about how wretched they are? Isn't it more natural to claim to be better than you are than to claim to be worse than you are? But instead of falsely claiming to be rich or of royal lineage, in modern America people seek rewards by falsely asserting they are victims—of homophobes, hypocrites, Karl Rove, racists, Republicans, and oppressive Alaska governors.

Liberals seem to have hit upon a reverse Christ story as their belief system. He suffered and died for our sins; liberals make the rest of us suffer for sins we didn't commit. Their claims of how awful “we” are never seems to encompass themselves in the “we.” Saying America is a racist nation is never meant to suggest that the speaker is a racist— it's his neighbors who are the racists. (Especially in Congressman John Murtha's district in Pennsylvania, apparently.) That's not a “mea culpa,” it's a “theya culpa.”
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Ironically, liberals' victim strategy works in this country precisely because of Americans' boundless tenderheartedness and generosity. Sailing to the New World in 1630 on the ship
Arabella,
the Puritans'
leader, John Winthrop, announced that they had entered into a covenant with God to create a “city upon a hill.” He said if they kept the covenant, “We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies.” Noting that “in all times some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity, others mean and in subjection,” Winthrop set forth the principles of Christian charity. He quoted from, among other things, the Book of Isaiah to proclaim the new citizens' obligation to “loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and … break every yoke.”
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That charitable American instinct has never left us. Even with greedy liberals Krazy-Gluing their wallets shut, Americans give more to charity than the citizens of any other country. After the deadly 2004 tsunami struck, the U.S. government gave $350 million to the victims, which was less than the $800 million given by the German government. But American citizens privately donated $2 billion, while the citizens of other countries gave virtually nothing, allowing their governments' aid to suffice.
⁶¹

The United States government bears most of the cost of NATO, military protection, refugee programs, and even useless international organizations such as the United Nations. But mere governmental figures are the least of it. Americans individually contribute more to charities than any other country—seven times more than Germans and fourteen times more than Italians.

Americans just adore disasters. They love to go in and clean up the mess, get turkeys out to the poor, take up a collection, make sandwiches, build shelters, and raise extravagant amounts of aid. On 9/11, there were more volunteers and more donated blood than the Red Cross could handle. Whether it's a flood in Mississippi, a hurricane in Louisiana, or a little girl falling down a pipe in Texas, Americans are almost greedy for a full-fledged disaster so they can all pitch in and help.

Liberals prey on this deep-seated American instinct to aid the afflicted by constantly bellyaching that they have been mortally offended. They are not offended, they are offending. They are not wounded victims, they are the marauding oppressors. They are not innocents, they are the guilty.

T
he most worshiped figure in modern America is the “single mother.” Politicians tout their programs by explaining how they will help single mothers. At campaign stops, a sure way to draw applause from the crowd is to introduce single mothers in the audience. No news report on a matter of national importance is complete unless it includes a sound bite from a single mother, preferably one bravely struggling to juggle a career and child-rearing obligations. Christian ministers cite the single mother in their sermons as the personification of selfless virtue. Jesse Jackson—at last count personally responsible for at least one single mother—compares single mothers to Mary the mother of Jesus. Even Superman's girlfriend Lois Lane is a single mother in the 2006 movie
Superman Returns,
in which the Man of Steel plays a superhero deadbeat dad.

Single mothers are not only “Unsung Heroines,” as the title of a
recent book puts it, they are perennial victims—the unwitting victims of sex with men they're not married to. Over and over again, we are told that this or that policy will result in “single mothers being hit hardest.” Newspapers must have a macro on their computers: “single women hardest hit.”

There is no better example of phony victims who are actually vic-timizers than single mothers. We're not living in Dickensian England, with husbands dropping like flies from cholera, plague, and industrial accidents, creating blameless single mothers. Charles Dickens's England had single mothers because the average life span for males, circa 1830, ranged from forty-four years for the middle and upper classes down to twenty-two years for laborers. That isn't the reason we have an explosion of single mothers in twenty-first-century America.

We have “single mothers” because more than a million women choose to have children out of wedlock every year in America, and do not then wed or give the babies up for adoption. By their own choices, they consign their children to starting life with second-class status.

Of all single mothers in America, only 6.5 percent of them are widows, 37.8 percent are divorced, and 41.3 percent gave birth out of wedlock.
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The 6.5 percent of single mothers whose husbands have died shouldn't be called “single mothers” at all. We already have a word for them: “widows.” Their children do just fine compared with the children of married parents.
¹⁶
Liberals refer to widows as “single mothers” to try to class up the category, much as they do with their infuriating description of the GI Bill as a form of “welfare” or the U.S. military as a successful “government program.”