Last night’s American Foundation for Equal Rights’ fundraiser in NYC was, by all accounts, a success — if you measure success by dollar bills. Which, well, yeah. Some $1.2 million came in for Ted Olson and David Boies’ legal bills, with $100,000 coming in yesterday alone. Co-hosted by gay terrorism architect Ken Mehlman (of private equity badboy Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company), Paul Singer (of hedge fund Elliott Management, and the father of a gay son); and Peter Thiel (of hedge fund Clarium Capital, and host of this weekend’s GOProud’s Homocon event at his New York City home), it was no surprise the event was full of Wall Street types, with some political operators (including George W.’s daughter Barbara, DNC treasurer Andy Tobias, Richard Socarides), activists (Jarrett Barrios, Brian Ellner), and arm candy mixed in. And while last night President Obama was heckled at his fundraiser over his AIDS and DADT strategy, nobody showed up to heckle Mehlman about spending his entire career demeaning his own community — and continuing to support those who do.
Here’s Mehlman’s address:
EARLIER:
Ken Mehlman, Suckling At The Teat of a Marc Maron’s 30,000-Feet Tweets
B
QUEERTY: “nobody showed up to heckle Mehlman about spending his entire career demeaning his own community” … because he almost certainly didn’t do that – rather he mostly deferred to Karl Rove et al. (and apparently did little or nothing to stop Rove). A person in his position spends nearly all of his time managing an organization that tries to get Republicans elected, including making sure that the all important fundraising is doing well. He wasn’t the “manager in charge of going after gays.”
Steve R
@B:
Wow! Really? He was just… following… orders?
Whoever posted that comment is either
(a) Mehlman
(b) Rove
(c) The Queen of Denial!
B
No. 2 · Steve R wrote, “@B: Wow! Really? He was just… following… orders?” Yes, really (and it wasn’t a case of “just following orders” but of having much more to do).
Look at what they actually pushed: try http://www.ontheissues.org/republican_party.htm#Civil_Rights which lists the Republican Party’s positions in 2004 and 2000. For the year 2004, the party’s position was that “Homosexuality is incompatible with military service” and they pushed for a “Constitutional Amendment banning same-sex marriage,” which they knew had no chance of passing. That’s two items out of about 64 listed for 2004. What you are missing is that they are acting like sociopaths – they only cared about what gets them ahead, and you don’t get ahead by centering your campaign on an anti-gay agenda (they were merely throwing some bones to their socially conservative base to keep those people on board).
Also look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Mehlman#Republican_National_Committee_chair : “As head of the RNC, Mehlman played a key role, along with Karl Rove, in executing the Republican Party’s long-term yet ultimately unsuccessful plan for electoral dominance. This is discussed at length in Peter Wallsten and Tom Hamburger’s book, One Party Country.”
Then read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Party_Country : “One Party Country refers to the Republican Party’s vision for long term electoral supremacy in the United States through a generation-long effort to develop its political infrastructure, its knowledge of voter motivations, and by appealing to voter demographics that have traditionally leaned to the Democrats (e.g. Latinos and African-Americans). It is also the name of the book, One Party Country: The Republican Plan for Dominance in the 21st Century, by Los Angeles Times reporters Peter Wallsten and Tom Hamburger.”
You can criticize Mehlman fairly for not caring if the party dumped on gays for political gain, but it’s not like he spent every waking hour thinking about how to limit gay rights.
mark
Mehlman should be taken in a restroom stall, grabbed by his bony ankles and dunked in a toilet 13 times for each anti-gay state initiative he put on battleground states, which gave us four more f*ckin’ years of Cheney.
Honestly I couldn’t be in the same city with him, and not knee him in the nads.
B
Re the reaction of 4 (as of this comment) “thumbs down’ on No 3: it sounds like a few people either don’t know what the chair of an organization does or they don’t like hearing the truth.
Saying that Mehlman was gay and stayed completely silent as Rove pushed an anti-gay agenda as a small part of a re-election campaign is damning enough. You don’t have to exaggerate and pretend Mehlman did nothing else.
You guys are also missing the obvious – one reason for the gay-baiting, besides appealing to the socially conservative base (who would then be ignored) was to distract liberals into arguing about gay rights instead of how the Republicans were screwing the American public left and right for the benefit of the richest 0.1% of the population.
Ummmmmm
I could be completely naive and uninformed, but why does this organization need upwards of millions of dollars in legal representation to support Perry vs. Swartzenegger in front of the Supreme Court?
SERIOUSLY???
Re: 3 – Don’t quote wikipedia and expect people to take you seriously
DR
@Ummmmmm:
No one ever said that the plaintiffs were being represented for free. Appeals to the US SCt cost at least $25,000 dollars. It’s not cheap. And I don’t believe that includes attorneys fees, just filing fees and all the little costs associated with lawsuits.
B
No. 7 · SERIOUSLY??? wrote, “Re: 3 – Don’t quote wikipedia and expect people to take you seriously”
Try http://blogs.nature.com/wp/nascent/2005/12/comparing_wikipedia_and_britan_1.html and http://news.cnet.com/Study-Wikipedia-as-accurate-as-Britannica/2100-1038_3-5997332.html
It seems, at least on technical topics, the Wikipedia is comparable in accuracy to the Encyclopedia Britannica (a bit worse but not much worse). Where you can’t trust the Wikipedia (at least in the past – they are tightening procedures when a need to do that is discovered) is on topics where people have a real incentive to lie.
Trying to disparage information simply because it appears in a Wikipedia article is simply a cheap debating trick with no basis in fact.
greatMan
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Conservatives R Mean (John From England)
@B:
You have no integrity. Or soul. But then that is what you need to be a conservative, so fair enough.
Imagine going out with you? “Well technically I did physical sleep with another human being without your knowledge though in an emotional aspect I have not fcatually done anything wrong so enough it’s not me who is incorrect but you for….”
Sigh.
B
Re No 11: I’m one of the few people on this thread, maybe the only one, who actually has some integrity, contrary to your baseless assertion. Just look at the people who gave negative ratings to No. 3, which simply provided some URLs with quotes from those URLS that were germane to the discussion: http://www.ontheissues.org/republican_party.htm#Civil_Rights , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Mehlman#Republican_National_Committee_chair , and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Party_Country . You are also lying when you claim I’m conservative: I’m not, but I am realistic about what is actually going on: the Republicans are using anti-gay sentiments on the part of “social conservatives” for marketing purposes, with a goal of getting these “social conservatives” to vote for a party whose policies are not in their economic interest.
The fact is that the chair of a political party’s national committee simply is not going to spend much time on an anti-gay agenda simply because there is too much on his plate. There aren’t enough hours in the day given the higher priority tasks he’s responsible for. Mehlman was probably telling the truth when he said that Rove pushed it (and Rove probably just farmed it out to underlings as Rove had more important things to do too). Mehlman just went along and didn’t oppose it.
Furthermore, if you search for “Bush marriage amendment” (don’t include the quotes), on the first page Google returns, you’ll get 3 items showing a 2004 date, 2 with no date (but those articles give a date on 2004 if you click on the link), 4 that give a data of 2004, and one that gives a date of 2005, but the 2005 one is about a senator reintroducing a marriage amendment while stating that “in a Jan. 16, 2005 interview with The Washington Post, Bush seemed to indicate that he would not push for a new amendment this session.” So what you seem to have is a pattern in which interest on Bush’s part in a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage was high when there was an upcoming election and low otherwise. Obviously the Republicans as a whole don’t really care about the issue – they were just throwing bones to the socially conservative part of their “base” in the hope of getting these morons excited enough to turn out and vote. But to realize that, you’ll have to learn to check your emotions at the door and look at the actual data.