JACK RYAN'S star has fallen. The handsome millionaire Illinois Senate candidate is a candidate no longer, the Republican Party's great white hope in the liberal Midwest state undone by a public release of his sordid divorce records. In the days after Ryan announced his withdrawal from the race, conservatives screamed bloody murder about a liberal media bias, about the absurdity of an America where a president can remain in office after an extramarital affair, but a Senate candidate can be destroyed for "experimenting" within the bonds of holy matrimony. These indignant voices, however, are missing the point.
Although the stories of Ryan dragging his wife to sex clubs, pressuring her into oral sex in public places and then reproaching her tearful refusal because "crying doesn't turn him on" show a cavalier disrespect for both his loved ones and women in general, the ruin of Jack Ryan wasn't about sex. To paraphrase that famous liberal maxim: It's the hypocrisy, stupid.
Ryan built a campaign around legislating morality for Illinois and for America. His platform offered promises to dismantle legal abortion, because it "cheapens human dignity" and to protect Americans from gay marriage, because homosexuality is part of "the breakdown of the family over the past 35 years [that] is one of the root causes of some of our society's most intractable social problems --criminal activity, illegitimacy, and the cyclical nature of poverty." The issue is not Ryan's sexual fetishes, but the way that his humiliation of his wife and disregard for his own marriage and family appear in the framework of his accusations that gays and the pro-choice are destroying the American family.
Unfortunately, the hypocrisy of Ryan is not an anomaly in conservative politics. Apparent in this campaign are shades of another Senate race, two years ago in Georgia. No one would fault Republican candidate Saxby Chambliss for his Vietnam medical deferment for his football injury. No one questioned the "courage to lead" of a man who let others in his generation fight in that war. Yet Chambliss ran a now famous ad campaign questioning that exact quality of his opponent, incumbent Max Cleland, illustrated with photographs of Osama bin Laden. Chambliss' dishonest comparison of Cleland, a man who lost three of his limbs in the battle of Khe Sahn, to a terrorist because Cleland didn't support President George W. Bush's version of a Homeland Security bill (a bill that Cleland had actually originally co-sponsored) was both stunningly hypocritical and sickeningly effective.
Chambliss now represents Georgia under Senate Republican leadership. That leadership, for the record, is comprised of Republican Majority Leader Bill Frist, Majority Whip Mitch McConnell, third-ranking Republican Rick Santorum and former Majority Leader Trent Lott -- not a single one of whom, interestingly enough, served their country in the armed forces. Those who might say the Georgia smear campaign is ancient history need only look at the Bush-Cheney attack on John Kerry's Vietnam service to see how, for the Republican party, hypocrisy repeats itself.
The laundry list of GOP hypocrites only goes on, and it's not about mistakes these individuals have made. No one would begrudge Senate wife Karen Santorum the $500,000 she sought in a 1999 case against her chiropractor, for example, or even the fact that her husband, Rick Santorum, testified on her behalf in the case. Yet viewed in light of Sen. Santorum's 1994 Comprehensive Family Health Access and Savings Act to cap lawsuit damages at $250,000, the $350,000 eventually awarded to Mrs. Santorum begins to smack of duplicity.
And conservative pundit Rush Limbaugh's drug addiction and ensuing plea for forgiveness is no cause for contempt until put in the context of his own statements that "drug use is destroying this country
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