"Blackwell & Hannity demonstrate the GOP's commitment to privacy" - GG

[greeneyedboy]

check out this delicious piece on the utter hypocrisy of Blackwell and Hannity and their crew:

http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/10/ken-blackwell-and-sean-hannity.html

Ken Blackwell and Sean Hannity demonstrate the GOP's commitment to privacy

We learned this week that the one thing Republicans find absolutely despicable is using someone's private homosexuality for political gain. Politics might be a contact sport, but they simply cannot tolerate the disclosure of a politician's private sexual behavior. For instance, The Cincinnati Enquirer reported on Thursday that Ohio Republican Ken Blackwell is now attempting to win his election for Governor by working with Fox News' Sean Hannity and another right-wing radio talk show host to publicize innuendo that Blackwell's Democratic opponent, the married Ted Strickland, is gay:

. . . .

On Wednesday night, Sean Hannity put Cunningham on Fox's Hannity & Colmes in order to disseminate the innuendo that Strickland is gay, the "proof" being that he took a trip to Italy with his 26-year-old "boy toy" Congressional aide. And now, the Blackwell campaign itself is sending these "reports" of Strickland's alleged homosexuality to reporters throughout Ohio.

Right-wing pundits this week spent several days expressing such intense outrage over the outing by Mike Rogers, claiming that the conduct of this single, obscure blogger somehow shows how depraved and evil The Democratic Party itself is. Many of them literally claimed that Democrats deserve to lose the election because of the actions of Rogers. A certain loyal gay Republican rather sadly claimed that the Mike Rogers outing incident shows that Republicans have now become the pro-gay party ("it is conservatives sticking up for gay people and their privacy").

. . . .

Ken Blackwell was chosen to be the nominee of the Republican Party for Governor in Ohio. He has the support of the entire GOP national political establishment, is an elected Republican official, played a crucial role in George Bush's 2004 victory in Ohio, and has been widely considered a rising Republican star. After Rush Limbaugh (who has long spread insinuations that Hillary Clinton is gay), Sean Hannity (who this week also promoted and defended a new book claiming that Cindy Sheehan had an affair with Lew Rockwell and is an online porn addict) is the most popular GOP pundit in the country.

Exploiting politicians' private sexual behavior generally, and the practice of "outing" specifically, is a tactic used by some of the most important Republican and conservative political figures. By contrast, Mike Rogers is an obscure Internet blogger and I'm not aware of a single prominent Democrat who supports him or has any connections to him. Yet we are told that hatred for outing is a reason to vote against Democrats, because Republicans would never engage in such lowly behavior and have nothing to do with it.

. . . .

it's worth reading the whole thing at

http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/10/ken-blackwell-and-sean-hannity.html