Did Maverick McCain have a girlfriend?

This New York Times story suggests that maybe he did: For McCain, Self-Confidence on Ethics Poses Its Own Risk By Jim Rutenberg, Marilyn Thompson, David Kirkpatrick and Stephen Labaton 02/21/08.

But Republicans don't care if their candidate might have had what their theocrats officially consider illicit sex. They. Don't. Care. They would impeach Bill Clinton or Barack Obama over a half-baked love affair. But they don't care if the bold Maverick was being naughty.

Because today's authoritarian Republican Party is operating on the attitude that Gene Lyons described so well in his Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater (1996):

Given literacy levels among the lowest in the United States, what this adds up to is a populist brand of political warfare that often descends to the level of professional wrestling. In a small, largely rural state [Arkansas] with only one real city, it also makes for fantastic - and highly entertaining - gossip. Almost everybody, it seems, has a neighbor whose second cousin knows an old boy who worked on the governor's dentist's car, and he says ...

During the 1990 Arkansas gubernatorial primaries, for example, lurid tales of lust and fornication were widely circulated about three of the four serious candidates - both Republicans, and, of course, Governor Bill Clinton. Only Clinton's Democratic opponent, an earnest good-government type perceived to have no chance, escaped suspicion. There was talk of whores, drunken orgies at duck-hunting clubs, illegitimate children, hush money, even suicides. One Arkansas politician was rumored to have had carnal knowledge of a convicted murderess inside her jail cell. Interracial sex, of course, is a topic of perennial interest. Indeed, it takes some effort to think of an Arkansas politician of note about whom scurrilous rumors haven't circulated.

For most Arkansas voters, evaluating this avalanche of smut has always been simple: your candidate is innocent, his or her opponents are probably guilty. The fact that political fault lines here tend to coincide with religious differences - hard-shell denominations to the right, "mainstream" churches to the left - makes it easy to caricature one's enemies as pious hypocrites. Otherwise, it would be tempting to suspect that many Arkansans harbor the secret belief that any politician - or TV evangelist, for that matter - who didn't have some rooster in him couldn't be much of a man.

But who would have dreamed that this stuff could be exported?

One more part of that old (?) Southern segregationist perspective that today's Republican Party has embraced so completely.

Tags: mccain, neosegregation, republican party