Anatomy of a rolling, homophobic breakdown

Even Roy Cohn fared better than this, and for much longer--in the 1950s!

April 21, Daily Caller, Matt Lewis:

With Mitt Romney under fire for hiring an openly gay spokesman, a growing chorus of conservatives are also voicing concern over his possible running mate’s [Gov. Chris Christie] appointment of an openly gay Republican to the New Jersey Supreme Court.

April 24, Washington Post:

[T]he Romney campaign has had to fend off criticism from social conservatives who object to [Richard] Grenell’s appointment because he is gay.

April 27, National Review, Matthew Franck:

If [a cited critic] thinks that the gay-rights agenda doesn’t have any bearing on American foreign policy, he’s not paying attention.... [And] Suppose Barack Obama comes out — as Grenell wishes he would — in favor of same-sex marriage in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. How fast and how publicly will Richard Grenell decamp from Romney to Obama?

May 1, ABC's The Note:

Richard Grenell, an openly gay foreign policy spokesman for the Romney campaign, resigned from his recently-appointed post on Tuesday.

May 1, Jennifer Rubin, WaPo's Right Turn:

Despite the controversy in new media and in conservative circles, there was no public statement of support for Grenell by the campaign and no supportive social conservatives were enlisted to calm the waters.

You gotta love National Review's resident neurotic, who broods that a gay, conservative foreign-policy adviser would, in a heartbeat, defect to the enemy camp over the issue of a personal adjective but not his core expertise. And the unexplained and apparently central "bearing" of gay rights on American foreign policy? What geopolitical hotspot, around which U.S. policy is based, is Franck--and by extension the National Review--so keyed up about? Uganda?

But my favorite here is Jennifer Rubin, who titles her piece, "Richard Grenell hounded from Romney campaign by anti-gay conservatives." Rubin is unmistakably disappointed in her man Romney's unmistakable cowardice, thus she chooses to frame the imbroglio as Grenell's having been "hounded" out by social conservatives rather than sold out by Mitt.

Jennifer you poor thing. Your candidate is so compromised by so many tribal factions and flying prejudices and past infidelities and present commitments and temporary truces and unexpungible obligations and sincere and insincere pledges both, you're doomed to dance the Lindy with a mortified grimace for another six months. You poor thing.

Comments

[janicket]

Yet another brick in the towering edifice of R-Money's cowardice -- an edifice with an eternally empty core.

[Beauzeaux]

Roy Cohn was not exactly "openly gay." He denied being gay until he died.
Roy Cohn survived being closeted for so long because he was a first-rate evil, dishonest, kisser of right-wing ass.

[Peter G]

I wonder how Romney feels about the thirty exceptionally tasteful ties he received in compensation for rubber necking the other way while the bus went thump thump?