Tuesday, July 10, 2007

GOP Family Values

How does the Republican Party get away with portraying itself as the party of “family values?” I just don’t get it.
Today we learn that Republican Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana, who was elected to Congress in 1998 to fill in for the disgraced adulterer and would-be Speaker Bob Livingston, has been caught in his own sex scandal.

Glenn Greenwald gives a good rundown of the whole sordid affair.
This is just another in a long line of Washington sex scandals and by my count Republicans have been the culprits in twice as many of these as Democrats during the past decade.

And yet this myth persists that Republicans are somehow morally superior to Democrats because of their intolerant and often hypocritical stand on “family values.”
Right now the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination is Rudy Guiliani who has been divorced twice, is estranged from his kids and had to drop out of the 2000 Senate race against Hillary Clinton when it was revealed that he was having an affair at the time.
And now here comes Fred Thompson, the supposed saviour of the political right, who it turns out divorced his wife of nearly 30 years just as his Hollywood career was taking off in 1985. Thompson then had dalliances with a string of celebrity starlets before getting remarried a few years later to a woman who is a quarter century younger than him.
I guess it wouldn’t be so bad if Republicans weren’t so insistent on presenting themselves as the Holier than Thou party, but somehow this whole charade persists.

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