Republican Weirdness on Political Spouses

Today's Chronicle carries a column by James Pinkerton (late of the Bush Sr. administration) that is just horribly, spectacularly wrong in about a dozen different ways.

It opens with some of the nastiest sexism this side of Townhall.com:

ISN'T IT GREAT that Bill and Hillary Clinton have such a great marriage -- that they can agree to disagree on important issues, even national security issues? OK, that's enough faux political correctness for now.

So let me tell you what I really think: It stinks that the ex-president husband and his wife, the junior U.S. senator from New York, have had such divergent positions in an important homeland-defense debate. Indeed, Hillary's foreign-affairs fecklessness, most recently on the Dubai Ports World deal, calls into question her fitness to be president, as long as Bill, too, is in the picture. If she can't lead him, how can she lead the rest of us?

Let's cut the bullshit here and acknowledge what Pinkerton is really saying: a politician's spouse should be seen and not heard (and by 'spouse', of course, he really means wife). This much is obvious from his swipes (later in the column) at Tony and Cherie Blair, and Bob and Liddy Dole. What's bugging him boils down to the fact that spouses have independent careers--which is to say the fact that women have careers independent of their husbands'. For Pinkerton, politicians should be men and their wives should be 'led' by them--hence his nasty little bit about Hillary's inability to 'lead' Bill (which comes as no surprise to him, I'm sure, as women leading men is just contrary to the Natural Order of Things).

Then the column gets...weird. He goes on about the Great Clinton Rift:

On Feb. 17, Hillary denounced the Dubai deal, declaring, "Our port security is too important to place in the hands of foreign governments." But then on March 2, the Financial Times reported that Bill was called in to advise the United Arab Emirates about securing the deal for its company.

Now let's be clear: there really is serious potential for a conflict of interest there. If Bill is taking money from the folks trying to get the ports deal, that does stink. Fair criticism, as far as it goes...but that's not what Pinkerton is criticizing. Pinkerton's gripe, when you get down to it, is that there isn't an ethics violation. His problem is that Clinton takes money from the UAE, but Hillary speaks against their interest. My god, it's horrible...shocking...so...so...un-Republican.

Now, the odds are pretty good that Pinkerton doesn't believe a word of this nonsense and is just manufacturing an attack with whatever he can get his hands on. That said, I wouldn't rule out the possibility that this upside-down morality is really how he thinks--because it's really how a lot of Republicans think. To them, Abramoff is no big deal; it's just market forces in action. You're duty bound to vote for the interests of your contributors; after all, a deal's a deal. If you don't like it, go buy your own goddamn government.

Under this philosophy, then it really is an outrage for Hillary to go against the interest of anyone giving money to Bill. And this, after all, is the philosophy of the people who run the country.

[That's all, folks]