Republican Hypocritical High Road

[Doug]

DOUG
The stereotype of Republican male politicians as family-oriented, faithful husbands and Democrats as faithless cheats is a long way from reality. If the GOP tries to pull that in November, they should watch out.

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Last month, The New York Times published a 2,000-word, front-page dissection of Bill and Hillary Clinton's marriage. It contained no real news, few named sources, and plenty of gossip masquerading as political coverage. Observing that the Clintons typically spend 14 days of each month together -- hardly unusual for a couple that includes a senator and a peripatetic former president -- the Times opted for the half-empty conclusion that the two lead "largely separate lives."

...Now the Times piece suggests that we're in for three long years in which reporters will judge Hillary Clinton's character by rumors about her husband. But it may be Republicans who have the most to lose.

But it wasn't until 2000 that McCain, possibly emboldened by Clinton's survival of his scandals, became the first confessed adulterer to have the nerve to run. Now, just a few years after infidelity was considered a dealbreaker for a presidential candidate, the party that presents itself as the arbiter of virtue may field an unprecedented two-timing trifecta.

McCain was still married and living with his wife in 1979 while, according to The New York Times' Nicholas Kristof, "aggressively courting a 25-year-old woman who was as beautiful as she was rich." McCain divorced his wife, who had raised their three children while he was imprisoned in Vietnam, then launched his political career with his new wife's family money. In 2000, McCain managed to deflect media questioning about his first marriage with a deft admission of responsibility for its failure. It's possible that the age of the offense and McCain's charmed relationship with the press will pull him through again, but Giuliani and Gingrich may face a more difficult challenge. Both conducted well-documented affairs in the last decade -- while still in public office...

But the most notorious of them all is undoubtedly Gingrich, who ran for Congress in 1978 on the slogan, "Let Our Family Represent Your Family." (He was reportedly cheating on his first wife at the time). In 1995, an alleged mistress from that period, Anne Manning, told Vanity Fair's Gail Sheehy: "We had oral sex. He prefers that modus operandi because then he can say, 'I never slept with her.'" Gingrich obtained his first divorce in 1981, after forcing his wife, who had helped put him through graduate school, to haggle over the terms while in the hospital, as she recovered from uterine cancer surgery. In 1999, he was disgraced again, having been caught in an affair with a 33-year-old congressional aide while spearheading the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton...

What you can't argue, however, is that it's OK for the press to scrutinize one party's candidates and not the other's. If Hillary Clinton's marriage has been publicly dissected on the front page of the newspaper of record, why should the marital infidelities of GOP candidates be off limits? The answer is, they shouldn't be, and despite the mainstream press' deep reluctance, they probably won't be.

Steve Benen is a freelance writer and editor of The Carpetbagger Report.

Read the rest here.

[Guest]

Oh yes they will. It will be "old news" or some other bought and paid for MSM technique - the same MSM that hasn't dogged Bushco about Iraq or FEMA or deficits or ethics or anything else the corporate owners didn't want making daily headlines until it finally sunk into the American consciousness.