Gay Journalist's Incredible
Attempts To Infect
Candidate With Flu
Snotty Little Germ Spreads Liberal Hate
By Rod Dreher
nypostonline.com
1-28-2000
During the Clinton impeachment battle, the online magazine Salon gratuitously revealed that leading House Republican Henry Hyde had an extramarital affair 30 years ago.
Was that playing dirty?
"Frankly, yes," the mag's editors conceded in an editorial. "But ugly times call for ugly tactics."
Salon, ever a trailblazer, has just gone beyond character assassination against conservative politicians, and has begun going after them with germ warfare.
This week in Salon, syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage wrote of his undercover stint with the Gary Bauer campaign in Iowa. While lying in a Des Moines hotel room suffering from the flu, Savage caught the candidate on TV speaking out against gay marriage.
That did it. The openly gay Savage decided his mission was clear: "Get close enough to Bauer to give him the flu, which, if I am successful, will lay him flat just before the New Hampshire primary."
Savage regales readers with tales of coughing on everything in the Bauer office, even licking doorknobs when nobody was looking. He sucked on a pen he later handed to the candidate.
"My plan was a little malicious -- even a little mean-spirited," Savage wrote. "But those same words describe the tactics used by Bauer and the rest of the religious right against gays and lesbians."
My, what tidy moral reasoning. Hate your opponent's rhetoric? Then do your dead-level best to put him and his staff in the hospital. Ugly times, after all, call for ugly tactics.
Bauer's Iowa office was shell-shocked by the news.
"We just kind of knew him as Dan," said Iowa campaign director Loras Schulte. "This is trash-can journalism at its worst. I have no idea what he may have tried to infect us with."
Indeed, it's hard to think of a stunt (cont)
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