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intervention. In any event, the only person ever to complain about Richards's constant gay alerts was a liberal Republican, state senator Bill Ratliff—as admitted by Rich's own source, the Rove-obsessed
Huffington Post
columnist. 53 I realize that in the world of the Bush-haters, anything any Republican ever says must have come on direct orders from Karl Rove. But back in the Euclidian world, there's no evidence that Rove had anything to do with any rumors that Richards was gay. Frank Rich hates Rove, ergo he calls Rove's father gay.
    There is nothing liberals love more than vicious gay-baiting, which they disguise as an attack on “hypocrisy.” They throw it out whenever a Republican is caught engaging in any sort of bad behavior, never bothering to check to see if any actual hypocrisy is involved.
    When Senator Larry Craig pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct after he was accused of making a foot-tapping proposition to an undercover cop in a Minneapolis Airport bathroom, the media jeeringly gay-baited Craig for a week—and then accused Republicans of being homophobic for not insisting that Craig stay in office and run for reelection so their gay-baiting could continue unabated. Liberals accused Larry Craig of leading a double life, but they are the ones who constantly want to have it both ways. They wanted to be hysterical about Larry Craig—and hysterical about Republicans for not standing by Larry Craig. They wanted to gay-bait Republicans—and accuse Republicans of gay-baiting.
    The
Washington Post
ran thirty items on Craig in the month after the story broke. The
New York Times
ran thirty-seven items—and then continued to provide
Times
readers with monthly
Larry Craig: Deviant
updates after that. In five separate columns, Frank Rich sneered about Craig—this from the newspaper that thinks we're wallowing in 9/11 anniversary coverage.
    MSNBC's Chris Matthews opened his
Hardball
program on August 28, 2007, “The big story tonight, dirty politics. Idaho senator Larry Craig, cultural warrior of the right, stands naked tonight, exposed asboth a sexual deviant and a world-class hypocrite.” 54 Normally, using the word “deviant” in reference to a gay person would be a linguistic offense worse than calling college basketball players “nappy-headed hos,” but fortunately for Matthews, no one watches
Hardball.
    Naturally, the media claimed that Larry Craig was a hypocrite because he opposed gay marriage—and yet he propositioned an undercover cop in a public bathroom! Hypocrite!
    But unless Craig proposed marriage to the undercover cop in the airport bathroom, I'm not seeing the hypocrisy. If Democrats were claiming that Craig was simply a bad person—but not a hypocrite—for living in a sham marriage for political gain, I note that Democrats voted for someone with those credentials for president in 1992 and 1996.
    The Craig disorderly conduct charge also allowed
Newsweek
’
s
Jonathan Alter to resurrect a long-ago-disproved hoax sex scandal out of Ohio. Claiming that the “conservative-hypocrisy angle goes way back,” Alter cited “the Franklin child-sex ring, which ensnared more than a dozen officials in the Reagan and first Bush administrations.” 55 It was odd that the rest of the mainstream media had failed to take note of a “child-sex ring” involving “more than a dozen officials in the Reagan and first Bush administrations,” but since
Newsweek
tries to pass off Alter as a serious journalist, this required a quick Nexis check.
    The “Franklin child-abuse sex scandal” grew out of a 1988 federal embezzlement investigation of Lawrence King, manager of the Franklin Community Federal Credit Union, in Omaha. This was in the midst of the child sex-abuse hysteria of the 1980s, so naturally, state and federal investigators were soon investigating child sex-abuse charges that somehow involved the embezzled money.