Move On.Org's Double Standard

I am about to piss off all of my Democratic friends, all of my liberal friends and all of my feminist friends....

But it's your own fault. Sorry.

Remember an organization that was born in the midst of the partisan warfare within the Beltway during Clinton's presidency? MoveOn.Org was launched initially to oppose the Republican-led effort to impeach Clinton. Initially called "Censure and Move On," it invited visitors to add their names to an online petition stating that "Congress must Immediately Censure President Clinton and Move On to pressing issues facing the country."

The whole point of the MoveOn petitions was to quit wasting taxpayer monies on what amounted to a stealth attack on the people's choice for President of the United States. The sense at the time, which I clearly recall because I was part of this consensus, was that as a nation we had better things to do than spend billions of dollars of taxpayers' money to investigate yet another case of Men Behaving Badly. Gee, the POTUS got a blow job from his intern....this is news? You wasted my hard-earned tax dollars to discover yet another politician is having sex with an aide?

MoveOn.Org was a truly grass-roots, computer generated petition movement started by two Berkeley computer entrepreneurs. Granted, they were Berkeley liberals but even Berkeley liberals get it right some of the time. Sadly, it was grass-roots only until it sold its soul to George Soros.

Being aware that Clinton had the happy precedent of FDR, Ike, JFK and MLK, and having lived in the Beltway suburbs twice during my father's tour of duty at the Pentagon, it came as no huge shock that such things could and often did happen in the hallowed precincts of government.

Like many people, I was appalled at the waste of taxpayer money spent investigating the Clintons and the fact that the only thing of note that the investigation turned up was a man's denial of having an affair when publicly questioned about it (which in an earlier age would have been the chivalrous response) only convinced me, as it did others, that this was nothing more than a partisan attempt at impeachment because the Republicans would stoop to any low tactic to remove the lawfully elected President. Besides, I thought Gore was a pompous dunce and didn't want him running the country anyway.

I still think the original petition was well-founded, and that like a person's sex life, birth control, and how you voted in the last general election, there are just some things that aren't the government's business--and that includes elected officials' sexual indiscretions. It's private. You don't "need to know." For those of you who disagree on the grounds that it is a reflection on a man's moral character -- well, in this department, generally, men don't have "moral character." I'm sure there are exceptions, but the general rule, long acknowledged in human history, is that men screw around. As my mother-in-law was fond of saying, "A stiff d$#^ has no conscience."

But then MoveOn.Org sold out. It became not a grass-roots effort to curb ridiculous government expenditures on stupid partisan issues, but instead a Left-liberal mouthpiece for trashing Republicans.

In 2003, rather than focusing on the substantive issues, MoveOn.Org wasted its donors' money on attack ads alleging that Arnold Schwarzenegger was a serial groper of women. This overbroad attack was seriously undermined by using as support the claims of women who were into body-building and Hollywood groupie-dom some twenty years earlier, none of whom filed a complaint with anyone -- not police, not friends, not relatives, not SAG, not the owner of the gym -- at the time of these alleged sexual harassments. And, not coincidentally, the first public complaint of this alleged groping behavior came at anti-Schwarzenegger press conferences and rallies called by....MoveOn.Org.

That attack ad alone would have been bad enough, but there were others accusing the Republican candidate of "hijacking" the great state of California; after he was elected, MoveOn.Org mounted a recall petition.

MoveOn.Org also lambasted Schwarzenneger for refusing to provide copies of his immigration files.

Gee, is that like refusing to provide copies of one's Hawaiian birth certificate?

The last time MoveOn.Org solicited contributions from me, I sent them a curt note declining to contribute on the grounds that if we, the taxpayers, were supposed to simply "censure and move on" with regard to Clinton's sexual peccadilloes, which were allegedly numerous, then certainly the same standard applied to all politicians and candidates, and their blatant disregard for their founding mission in the interests of promoting a partisan political agenda and smear campaign was very, well, Gingrich-like. No thanks.

And now it's "I-told-you-so-time" on the Left. Schwarzenneger has admitted to sleeping with a housekeeper on his staff and fathering a child. Apart from the heartbreak this has caused to nearly everyone intimately connected with this, he is being lambasted on Facebook, Twitters, Talkbacks and Op-Eds by liberal, Left and/or feminist commenters everywhere.

"What a pig!" one said.

"Maria doesn't deserve this heartbreak."

"He should be castrated!"

Tiger Woods didn't get this kind of opprobrium. Neither did Jesse Jackson, who fathered a child on an aide. Or Willie Brown, who although not married, got an aide pregnant and acknowledged the child was his. John Edwards did come in for more condemnation but that wasn't because he had an affair -- it was because he dissed the campaign wife, dying of cancer, who stood by him throughout his political career.

I have a problem with the Double Standard. Not THAT Double Standard, where men are "men" but "girls" must be "virgins" ... I have a problem when the media and it's sheep-like public pillory one politician or prominent public figure for sexual escapades, but give a pass to others. Especially as the distinction seems to be strictly along political party lines....

I give the Governator a lot of credit, actually. In an era when public officials have to chase deadbeat dads through the court system to get even minimal child support payments, he did the old-fashioned European thing and took financial responsibility for his child. Under California law, he didn't have to: a parent has only two years to contest or claim paternity. From all accounts, Schwarzennegger was told that the child was his only after that statute of limitations had passed.

That says more about his moral compass to me than baseless allegations of groping brought by MoveOn.Org-sponsored Arnold-bashing press conferences.

Move on, okay?