Today Glenn Reynolds is linking to this ridiculous post by Arthur Silber that completely misreads and misunderstands the point of a Michael Kinsely column about politicians private lives.
The short version is that Kinsley wrote an op-ed saying that if Arnold Schwarzenegger really did have a gang bang with his body building buddies, then, well, that’s just disgusting. But then the post at Coldfury.com turns up this old Kinsey article from which the following excerpt is pulled,
As usual, Dan Quayle put it best. “Do we really want to ask or answer all these irrelevant questions about what someone may or may not have done 20 or 30 years ago? Quite frankly, the American people don’t care,” he told the New York Times recently. “And quite frankly, it’s not that important. What’s important is who you are today, what you’re going to do.”
Quite right. What does it matter if, for example, Bill Clinton forced himself on Juanita Broaddrick way back in 1978? Whom a man may have raped in the privacy of her hotel room when he was attorney general of Arkansas has nothing to do with his ability to lead the nation into the 21st century. If an elected official is doing a good job, how he relaxes during his free time is not a legitimate public concern.
To which Silber responds,
How “he relaxes during his free time” — about a possible rape? And now he dares to criticize Schwarzenegger for his behavior — “even it if was consensual all around”? And if you don’t think Kinsley meant it about rape, read the rest of the column, which concludes with this:
. . .
So now we are living in the world everyone has long claimed to want: where we judge politicians based only on the issues and their public records of governance. Some might feel that healthy indifference to what politicians do in their private lives has gone too far when it covers allegations of rape. But they’ll get used to it.
But, of course, Kinsley is not at all saying that rape is off limits. Rather the point of the column was Republican hypocrisy about political candidates’ private lives.
Specifically, the column is about whether or not George W. Bush used illegal drugs. Kinsley is pointing out how hypocritical it was of Republicans to simply dismiss, as Quayle did, such allegations simply because those events would have taken place decades ago.
His claim that it doesn’t matter, then, if Clinton raped someone in 1978 is sarcastic, and he makes it perfectly clear what he is driving at in a section that Silber conveniently leaves out,
Some might demur that rape is not a peccadillo. It is, among other things, illegal. But so are pot smoking and cocaine snorting, which are high on the list of private behavior politicians are getting little gold stars for refusing to discuss. Is rape a worse crime than using drugs? Well, many might think so, but you wouldn’t know it from the way most politicians talk about drugs. In declining to talk about his own drug experience, George W. made the interesting point that he didn’t want to give young people today the unfortunate (though accurate) impression that you could do whatever he did when young and still end up governor of Texas. Certainly this argument applies in the case of alleged rape by a president even more currently popular than the governor of Texas.
And surely this is obvious by the time Kinsley talks about Larry Flynt,
Then there’s Larry Flynt. A few conservative voices, such as the Weekly Standard and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, remained steadfast in their hysterical disapproval of the president’s private sexual behavior, and remained adamant that it is a legitimate public issue. But even they–like all politicians of both parties, almost all the media, and most of the citizenry–were hysterical and adamant that Larry Flynt should not be allowed to draw public attention to the private sexual behavior of anyone else. (The Journal even insisted that Flynt should be prosecuted for blackmail.)
Why? If a category of information is legitimately useful in judging an elected public official, how can it be illegitimate and outrageous to gather and publish such information? Maybe they decided that Clinton was a good place to stop. When your side has launched an offensive, been driven back, and nervously awaits a counteroffensive, it’s not a bad time for an armistice. That would be hypocritical of course. But newspapers have the right to practice hypocrisy in the privacy of their own editorial pages.
It’s difficult for me to understand how anyone could have read this column and concluded that Kinsley was saying that 20 year old rape allegations don’t matter, when the real point is obviously that Republicans were being hypocritical about the privates lives of candidates for their own political purposes.
Sources:
The Vast Conspiracy That Cried Wolf Michael Kinsley, Slate, Feb. 28, 1999.
MICHAEL KINSLEY: PRUDE, BUSYBODY — AND BIGTIME HYPOCRITE. Arthur Silber, September 5, 2003.