I still love you / Je ne sais pas pourquoi
There’s apparently a great deal of self-deception going around over the upcoming election. A few weeks back, Virginia Postrel chided libertarians about citing Bush’s betrayal of free trade principles as a reason to vote for Kerry. Everybody and his grandmother thinks Andrew Sullivan is being soft on Kerry because he feels spurned by Bush.
Contrariwise, Michael Demmons says Boi from Troy is delusional for comparing Bush-Cheney favorably to other Republican presidential tickets on gay rights. And Dale Carpenter has a piece up at IGF about the nerve-abrading contortions of gay Democrats at and after the convention–a topic that’s been flogged lifeless by others but that Carprenter treats with characteristic point and clarity:
What to make of the Boston Democrats? They really like gay people, but they’d really rather the American public didn’t know that. And what of gay Democrats? They’re high-minded idealists when they criticize gay Republicans for working within a party that doesn’t much like gays; but they’re sober-minded pragmatists when assessing their own party’s treatment of gays. Yes, they acknowledge, the Boston convention was a retreat from gay visibility at past conventions. But, they quickly add, that’s necessary to defeat the evil Republicans.
Kerry announced his obligatory respect for diversity in language so general President Bush himself could have used it. He also tried to undermine Republican moralism by claiming to support