Maureen Dowd on the Republicans and gay Arabic translators

In today's New York Times, Maureen Dowd has some choice words for the Republican presidential candidates regarding the gay Arabic linguists controversy:

Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue, as the gloriously gay Oscar Wilde said. And gays are the sacrifice that hypocritical Republican candidates offer to placate “values” voters — even though some candidates are not so finicky about morals regarding their own affairs and divorces.

They may coo over the photo of Dick Cheney, whose re-election campaign demonized gays, proudly smiling with his new grandson, the first baby of his lesbian daughter, Mary.

But they’ll hold the line, by jiminy, against gay Americans who are willing to die or be horribly disfigured in the cursed Bush/Cheney war in Iraq.

Maureen Down has been justifiably criticized in the past for her tendency to devote whole columns to subjects like John Edward's hair. Despite the fact that she's a liberal, Dowd has a history of badly damaging the campaigns of Democratic presidential candidates. With both Al Gore and John Kerry, she used meaningless incidents (like John Kerry's windsurfing-in-spandex adventure) to push a consistent narrative: that the Democratic presidential candidate was a Big Phony. So it's good to see her snark turned on a worthier target.