Gay Montana, continued
Lost of interesting stuff on the Taylor/Baucus gay ad today:
To their credit, The Daily Kos and Ted Barlow have essentially ‘come out’ (sorry, I couldn’t help myself) against the ad.
Andrew Sullivan notes, quite correctly, that if the roles were reversed, the libs would be screaming bloody murder.
Jane Galt thinks the whole problem could be solved by giving the Democrats a wedgie.
As expected, Josh Marshall describes himself as equivocal. Depends on what the meaning of the word is, is, I guess.
Nothing yet from The New Republic, although I am willing to bet that they will continue to defend the Lautenberg/Toricelli switch using this exact case as evidence that candidate switching will not happen frequently. Of course not- Mark Racicot believes in the rule of law.
John Fund reports this isn’t the first time Max Baucus has dabbled in sleazy campaign tactics:
That’s pretty much what political observers also said in 1978, when the Montana AFL-CIO decided to unload on Republican Larry Williams, an investment adviser who was running against Mr. Baucus for the Senate. The union distributed hundreds of thousands of copies of a photo, taken when Mr. Williams lived in California, that showed him wearing love beads and with an unkempt hairdo, a sharp contrast to the buttoned-down image he tried to convey in his Senate race.
Mr. Williams claimed the photo had been taken after he had finished a long flight, but the damage was done. Charles Johnson, a journalist for the Lee newspaper chain in Montana, says that “at the time, some election observers credited the move as a factor in helping Baucus win the tight race.”
Apparently homophobia is only bad when it hurts Democrats.
When nuts blow up a government building in Oklahoma City we are told it is because talk radio is anti-government. When a black man is dragged to death in Texas we are told it is because George Bush didn’t sign a hate crimes bill. The next time some gay kid is beaten to death will we hear that it is because the Democratic Party has made gays into objects of derision?