"I didn't do it, but if I did...

[Mythsaje]

it wasn't my fault."

Ah, yes. The illicit mating cry of the red-handed Republican. He didn't have sex with that gay prostitute. Or sex with that female prostitute. Or write disturbingly sexual e-mails to underage pages. Or casually offer twenty bucks to an undercover officer for the privilege of performing oral sex on him.

Or, well, if he DID, it was the media's fault.

Imagine a life in which you could claim no responsibility for your actions. "Sorry, Your Honor. I didn't MEAN to knock over that liquor store. But I would've gotten away with it if not for them meddling reporters!"

Course, we have to remember that the Vitter story was broken by none other than the notorious Larry Flynt, Publisher of Hustler Magazine, a man for whom such filth is just another day on the job. Digging through the trash of other peoples' lives is what he lives for, particularly since a would-be assassin's bullet left him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He has reason to have a hard-on for the religious hypocrites of the world, those who claim moral superiority in public but practice torpitude in private. It was their hateful rhetoric that sent his attacker on a collision course with Flynt.

What we have to remember, of course, is that these are "decent, Christian men" who've simply made a mistake, or fallen prey to temptation. It's unfair of us to hold them up to any kind of standard of behavior, since we liberals are all so "morally ambiguous" ourselves. How DARE we judge a person for failing to live up to his own self-righteousness?

I mean, shouldn't we feel some sympathy for the poor closeted gay Christian Republican, condemned to suffer the wants and needs of something that goes against everything he believes? It couldn't possibly be that he's wrong, now can it? Rather than confronting the fact that maybe, just maybe, he didn't make a CHOICE to be what he is, he tries to hide it from everyone until eventually his conflicted conscience prompts him into doing something so terribly stupid that he can't help but be caught out.

Poor guy. He was just leaning on the closet door and the latch failed. Out he came.

Vitter's a different story, of course. He's apparently one of those guys who likes to be diapered, and likes to be tended with great care by someone other than his wife--who probably didn't even know of this particular fetish of his. There's probably something quite Oedipal about all of this, but the very notion makes me squirm a bit. I really don't want to know.

And, just to prove how convoluted the average Republican thinking is, Vitter and his wife show how easy it is to speak out of both sides of one's mouth--claiming the right to privacy (a right the Republicans claim doesn't exist until they REALLY, REALLY need it) for themselves and conveniently forgetting that they played the opposite card when it was Bill Clinton and his family in the hot seat.

Apparently it's A-Okay to spend millions of the taxpayer's dollars to pry into the private sexual life of a Democrat, but it's completely wrong for a private citizen employing his own personal media outlet to expose the double life of a Republican.

I could rant on about the double standards, but, hey, it's par for the course for these folks. Religious Republicans not only coined the phrase "special rights," they're the poster children for wanting and expecting them.

And OF COURSE they forgive their own. They pretty much have to, don't they? If they didn't they'd sure have a lot of 'splainin' to do when they were caught out in similar fashion when their own perfidy is eventually revealed.

I mean, seriously. Look at these people.

Rush Limbaugh's drug problem (not to mention his viagra bust sneaking in from a known sex predator vacation paradise), Rodent O'Reilly's sexual harassment issues, Mark Foley's pagination preferences, Jeff Guckert/Gannon roaming the White House, and the rest of the Republican Follies to which we've been exposed over the past several years.

Being a Republican means never having to say "I'm sorry." Or, if you do, never having to mean it. After all, all your golfing buddies are just as screwy as you are under their masks. Of course they're big fans of Imperialism. They're all Romans under the skin.

;)

edited to fix a typo