Frank Rich Discovers the Sex Panic

''I DID nothing wrong,'' said Larry Craig at the start of his long national nightmare as America's favorite running, or perhaps sitting, gag. That's the truth. Justice lovers of all sexual persuasions must rally to save the Idaho senator before he is forced to prematurely evacuate his seat.

That was the opening graph in Frank Rich's September 23 column in the Sunday Times. The columnist, surely a bright spot for many New Yorkers come Sunday mornings, continued:

Not only did the senator do nothing wrong, but in scandal he has proved the national treasure that he never was in his salad days as a pork-seeking party hack. In the past month he has served as an invaluable human Geiger counter for hypocrisy on the left and right alike. He has been an unexpected boon not just to the nation's double-entendre comedy industry but to the imploding Republican Party....

What Mr. Craig did in that men's room isn't an offense either. He didn't have sex in a public place. He didn't expose himself. His toe tapping, hand signals and ''wide stance'' were at most a form of flirtation. As George Will has rightly argued, if deviancy can be defined down to ''signaling an interest in sex,'' then deviancy is what ''goes on in 10,000 bars every Saturday night in our country.'' It's free speech even if the toes and fingers do the talking.

The Minnesota sting operation may well be unconstitutional, as the A.C.L.U. says. Yet gay civil rights organizations, eager to see a family-values phony like Mr. Craig brought down, have been often muted or silent on this point. They stood idly by while Republicans gathered their lynching party, thereby short-circuiting public debate about the legitimacy of the brand of police entrapment that took place in Minnesota. Surely that airport could have hired a uniformed guard to police a public restroom rather than train a cop to enact a punitive ''Cage aux Folles'' pantomime.

Rich's observations were an important corrective to so much of the coverage of the Craig matter. At Gay City News, we can say that because nearly three weeks before, we made some of these same points.

First Duncan Osborne, in "Troubling Questions In Craig's Fall:"

For David K. Johnson, the flood of publicity that followed a report on the arrest of US Senator Larry Craig, an Idaho Republican, resembled the era he wrote about in "The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government," a 2004 book.

"I guess it called to mind a long history of Washington sex scandals, particularly gay sex scandals," said the history professor at the University of South Florida.

Martin Duberman, an emeritus professor of history at CUNY and the author of several books including "Stonewall," a 1994 history of the 1969 riots seen as marking the start of the modern gay rights movement, had a similar view.

"I guess one was what the hell are the cops still doing in bathrooms?" Duberman said when asked for any reactions to the stories. "That sent me back 50 years."

Andrew Miller, in a strongly argued op ed, "Larry Craig's Raw Deal," added his voice:

...Despite the schadenfreude we're probably all feeling, our movement does not have the luxury of picking and choosing whom it wants among its ranks. That Craig is not gay but just likes to hoover some dick whenever he's on layover is not a distinction that America is making at a gut level, despite protestations to the contrary. Whatever Craig believes about himself, he is being treated as a gay man.

The men whom Craig had sex with in tearooms are the same ones whose oppression he has enforced. Ironically, he is driven into tearooms by the society he helps to create and perpetuate. It is Larry Craig's right to sexual freedom we're fighting for, too.

In my own Letter from the Editor, "Sex Panic," I explored the deeply disturbing signs of anxiety I noted in the popular reaction to the scandal:

The issue began to emerge clearer for me when we posted my editor's letter last week online. Touching broadly on the Larry Craig matter, the letter specifically mocked an absurd question a CNN reporter posed to an undercover Atlanta airport cop about whether pedophilia was involved in any arrests he made... Before long, vituperative postings poured in. None was more disturbing than the following: "I know a toddler who was surrounded by gay perverts in a public bathroom who licked their lips and said they wanted to help him with his pants. But I guess that's alright too, because they're gay, right?" The contention is clearly apocryphal. In fact, I would argue, it's delusional. But it is also of a piece - even if in very extreme form - of much of what emerged in the public discourse in the past week...

A phenomenon documented repeatedly through history, a Sex Panic is a popular and hysterical reaction to perceived transgressions against public morality out of proportion to any underlying reality. Bound by rigid codes of sexual propriety, people simultaneously demonize those whose behavior they fear and exaggerate or perhaps completely misperceive the reality of that behavior... Anyone following the Craig story online has undoubtedly run across the sort of hysteria I found posted to my editor's letter last week. But, let's face it - most of the reaction was over the top... The real issue forming the indictment against Larry Craig's public service - his consistently anti-gay voting record, especially in the hypocritical light of his private conduct - goes largely unexamined by the media. Those who sought to spotlight the issue pre-Minneapolis are widely dismissed, even condemned, as gay activists with an outing agenda. A society traditionally hostile to the sexual rights of gay men thus suddenly adopts the conceit that privacy above all is sacrosanct.

The Times' Trifecta on Iraq

This past Sunday's New York Times op ed pages offered a brilliant triad of analyses of where the US Iraqi policy is in the wake of congressional testimony by General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker last week.

First, Frank Rich in a tough-minded column, "Will the Democrats Betray Us?," got to the heart of the matter:

SIR, I don't know, actually": The fact that America's surrogate commander in chief, David Petraeus, could not say whether the war in Iraq is making America safer was all you needed to take away from last week's festivities in Washington. Everything else was a verbal quagmire, as administration spin and senatorial preening fought to a numbing standoff.... General Petraeus couldn't say we are safer because he knows we are not.

Rich then turned to President George W. Bush's repackaging of the limited 2008 troop withdrawals:

The only troops coming home alive or with their limbs intact in President Bush's troop "reduction" are those who were scheduled to be withdrawn by April anyway. Otherwise the president would have had to extend combat tours yet again, mobilize more reserves or bring back the draft.

Finally, Rich, understanding that there is NOTHING more that can be expected from the Bush administration, challenges the 2008 contenders to offer more and to offer specifics:

New bin Laden tapes and the latest 9/11 memorial rites notwithstanding, we're back in a 9/10 mind-set. Bin Laden, said Frances Townsend, the top White House homeland security official, "is virtually impotent." Karen Hughes, the Bush crony in charge of America's P.R. in the jihadists' world, recently held a press conference anointing Cal Ripken Jr. our international "special sports envoy." We are once more sleepwalking through history, fiddling while the Qaeda not in Iraq prepares to burn.... Mr. Bush, confident that he got away with repackaging the same bankrupt policies with a nonsensical new slogan ("Return on Success") Thursday night, is counting on the public's continued apathy as he kicks the can down the road and bides his time until Jan. 20, 2009; he, after all, has nothing more to lose. The job for real leaders is to wake up America to the urgent reality.

Paul Krugman in "A Surge, and Then a Stab," focuses on Iraq's economic bloodline to diagnosis the surge's failure:

To understand what’s really happening in Iraq, follow the oil money, which already knows that the surge has failed... Without an agreed system for sharing oil revenues, there is no Iraq, just a collection of armed gangs fighting for control of resources. Well, the legislation Mr. Bush promised never materialized, and on Wednesday attempts to arrive at a compromise oil law collapsed. What’s particularly revealing is the cause of the breakdown. Last month the provincial government in Kurdistan, defying the central government, passed its own oil law; last week a Kurdish Web site announced that the provincial government had signed a production-sharing deal with the Hunt Oil Company of Dallas, and that seems to have been the last straw.... Ray L. Hunt, the chief executive and president of Hunt Oil, is a close political ally of Mr. Bush. More than that, Mr. Hunt is a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a key oversight body.

Having failed, Krugman writes, Bush has only one option -- to write that failure into the next president's history, not his own:

Here’s how I see it: At this point, Mr. Bush is looking forward to replaying the political aftermath of Vietnam, in which the right wing eventually achieved a rewriting of history that would have made George Orwell proud, convincing millions of Americans that our soldiers had victory in their grasp but were stabbed in the back by the peaceniks back home.

And finally, Thomas L. Friedman, the pundit who of these three has been most credulous about what Bush has attempted in Iraq, in "Somebody Else's Mess," offers the most damning assessment, echoing Rich's view, but going further:

George W. Bush delivered his farewell address on Thursday evening — handing the baton, and probably the next election, to the Democrats. Why do I say that? Because in his speech to the nation the president basically said that on the most important, indeed only, legacy issue left in his presidency, Iraq, there would be no change in policy — that a substantial number of U.S. troops would remain in Iraq “beyond my presidency.” Therefore, it will be up to his successor to end the war he started.

Friedman is clearly prepared to go long on Democratic stock, but also issues a warning to them:

While Mr. Bush’s tacit resignation last week greatly increases the odds of a Democratic victory in 2008, there are several wild cards that could change things: a miraculous turnaround in Iraq (unlikely, but you can always hope), a terrorist attack in America, a coup in Pakistan that puts loose nukes in the hands of Islamist radicals, or a recession induced by the meltdown in the U.S. mortgage market, which forces a stark choice between bailing out Baghdad or Chicago.

And Friedman too argues that the Democrats will have to have a proactive stance on national security, not one based solely on being the un-Bush:

Be careful: despite the mess Mr. Bush has made in the world, or maybe because of it, Americans will not hand the keys to a Democrat who does not convey a “gut” credibility on national security.

That argument is much the same as a warning Rich issues regarding the obsessively cautious signals coming from the Democratic presidential camps not only in their criticisms of Bush, but also in their unwillingness to take on those allies on the left -- specifically MoveOn.org -- who are muddying up the debate and throwing fuel on the fire of political divisiveness (though probably gathering a fair amount of cash in the process) rather than contributing to a national dialogue of clarity and purpose:

Americans are looking for leadership, somewhere, anywhere. At least one of the Democratic presidential contenders might have shown the guts to soundly slap the "General Betray-Us" headline on the ad placed by MoveOn.org in The Times, if only to deflate a counterproductive distraction. This left-wing brand of juvenile name-calling is as witless as the "Defeatocrats" and "cut and run" McCarthyism from the right; it at once undermined the serious charges against the data in the Petraeus progress report (including those charges in the same MoveOn ad) and allowed the war's cheerleaders to hyperventilate about a sideshow. "General Betray-Us" gave Republicans a furlough to avoid ownership of an Iraq policy that now has us supporting both sides of the Shiite-vs.-Sunni blood bath while simultaneously shutting America's doors on the millions of Iraqi refugees the blood bath has so far created.

Read these three pieces.

Frank Rich on the Return of the Whigs

In his September 9 New York Times op ed, Frank Rich, looking at this week's reports to Congress from General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, warns that what he calls a "24/7 Pentagon information ' war room'" will do work to do for the surge what the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, did for the new product launch of a war on Saddam five years ago this month.

White House "facts" about the surge's triumph are turning up unsubstantiated in newspapers and on TV. Instead of being bombarded with dire cherry-picked intelligence about W.M.D., this time we're being serenaded with feel-good cherry-picked statistics offering hope. Once again the fix is in. Mr. Bush's pretense that he has been waiting for the Petraeus-Crocker report before setting his policy is as bogus as his U.N. charade before the war. And once again a narrowly Democratic Senate lacks the votes to stop him.

And Rich points fingers at those responsible for the credulity with which the new Bush PR initiative is being received:

But this has not impeded them from posing as quasi-journalistic independent observers elsewhere ever since, whether on CNN, CBS, Fox or in these pages, identifying themselves as experts rather than Pentagon junketeers.... Katie Couric seemed to be drinking the same Kool-Aid (or eating the same lobster tortellini) as Mr. O'Hanlon. As "a snapshot of what's going right," she cited Falluja, a bombed-out city with 80 percent unemployment, and she repeatedly spoke of American victories against "Al Qaeda." Channeling the president's bait-and-switch, she never differentiated between that local group he calls "Al Qaeda in Iraq" and the Qaeda that attacked America on 9/11. Al Qaeda in Iraq, which didn't even exist on 9/11, may represent as little as 2 to 5 percent of the Sunni insurgency, according to a new investigation in The Washington Monthly by Andrew Tilghman, a former Iraq correspondent for Stars and Stripes.

"As the Iraqis Stand Down, We'll Stand Up," by Frank Rich, September 9.