Frank Rich: The O'Reilly Factor for Lesbians

[Keith 0]

"And guys, if you exploit a girl, it will come back to get
you. That's called 'karma.' "

- Bill O'Reilly, "The O'Reilly Factor for Kids"

IN the
annals of election year 2004, Oct. 13 will be remembered as
the day it rained lesbians in red America. That was when we
learned that Andrea Mackris, an associate producer on "The
O'Reilly Factor," had filed her sexual harassment law suit,
charging that her boss had an obsessive interest in
vibrators, phone sex and, most persistently, erotic
scenarios involving pairs of women. That night brought the
final presidential debate, in which John Kerry's
description of Mary Cheney as a lesbian so riled the
Bush-Cheney campaign, not to mention the easily aghast
Washington press corps, you'd have thought the vice
president's daughter was accused of enlisting in a
threesome with Bill O'Reilly.

What's followed ever since is an orgy of schadenfreude and
hypocrisy almost entertaining enough to take your mind off
Iraq (as the Bush-Cheney campaign hopes it will). It's the
kind of three-ring circus that makes me love this country.
Only in America could Mr. O'Reilly appear on "Live With
Regis and Kelly" to plug his new moralistic children's
advice book (sample dictum: "Healthy sex is a combination
of sensible behavior and sincere affection") just as old
and young alike were going online to search
thesmokinggun.com for the lewd monologues attributed to him
in Ms. Mackris's 22-page complaint. Everyone is now so busy
matching Mr. O'Reilly's alleged after-hours oratory - none
of which he or his lawyer immediately denied - with his
past condemnations of Janet Jackson, Ludacris, wet T-shirt
contests, Joycelyn Elders and the televised Madonna-Britney
smooch that the findings could fill another Starr report.
My own favorite example, hands down, is Mr. O'Reilly's
reverie about hooking up with "hot" Italian women during a
visit to the Vatican while his pregnant wife was marooned
at home in Plandome, Long Island.

The bad news for Fox is not only that its most bankable
cable star could end up in the third-tier broadcasting
oblivion of William Bennett but also that Fox News, handed
the kind of story it lives for, could not (or, more
precisely, would not) turn it into a mediathon, complete
with legal analysis from Greta, Gloria Allred and Jeanine
Pirro. So the network made do instead with the parallel
soap opera of Mary Cheney. The Focus on the Family politico
James Dobson quickly set the tone on "Hannity & Colmes" by
accusing Mr. Kerry of "outing" the vice president's
daughter - a charge duly echoed by others on the right,
led, inevitably, by The Wall Street Journal editorial page.


To try to prop up its fictional headline "Outing Mary
Cheney," The Journal argued that "Mr. and Mrs. Cheney have
not kept their daughter's lesbianism a secret but neither
have they shouted it to the sky." Huh? Though Dick Cheney
doesn't shout anything, he described his daughter as gay on
camera at an Iowa campaign appearance this summer. But
whatever Mr. and Mrs. Cheney may have to say about it, The
Journal never entertained the thought that Mary Cheney
herself has a voice in this matter. She has been openly gay
for years. Before the 2000 campaign, she held a job that
literally announced her homosexuality: gay and lesbian
liaison for Coors, a public marketing assignment that even
required her to travel the country with the winner of the
1999 International Mr. Leather competition. She later
joined the Republican Unity Coalition, a gay-rights
advocacy group formed as an alternative to the similarly
inclined Log Cabin Republicans.

From all the outcry over Mr. Kerry's invocation of Ms.
Cheney, with the attendant rhetoric about the evil of
exploiting a candidate's "child" in a campaign, you might
never guess that the child in question is not Chelsea
Clinton at age 12 but a 35-year-old woman (two years older
than Andrea Mackris). Or that she lives openly with her
partner, Heather Poe, whom she brought onstage after the
vice presidential debate. Or that she is the paid director
of vice presidential operations for the Bush campaign, and
that her mother is the author of a notorious potboiler
("Sisters," 1981) that drools over the prospect of lesbian
coupling with O'Reilly-like glee. (For choice excerpts from
Mrs. Cheney's fiction, go to
whitehouse.org/administration/sisters.asp ).

So you have to wonder what motivated the Bush-Cheney
brigade to go ballistic over Mr. Kerry's "outing" of Mary
Cheney after it had ignored not just John Edwards's
previous "outing" but also the earlier "outings" by Bush
campaign allies like the Concerned Women for America and
the Republican senatorial candidate Alan Keyes. Unlike the
Democrats, who spoke respectfully of gay sexual
orientation, these right-wing activists trashed the vice
president's daughter for sowing anti-family values. But as
Andrew Sullivan has pointed out, even when Mr. Keyes
attacked Mary Cheney in August for practicing "selfish
hedonism," the same Mrs. Cheney, who, "speaking as a mom,"
called Mr. Kerry "not a good man," spoke not at all.

To understand what strange game is playing out here, you
must go back to the equally close 2000 election. In the
campaign postmortems, Karl Rove famously attributed his
candidate's shortfall in the popular vote to four million
"fundamentalists and evangelicals" in the Republican base
who didn't turn up on Election Day. A common theory among
Bush operatives had it that these no-shows had been
alienated by the pre-election revelation of Mr. Bush's
arrest for drunk driving years earlier.

The current Bush-Cheney campaign clearly believes that for
these voters, Mary Cheney's sexuality could be a
last-minute turnoff equivalent to Mr. Bush's D.U.I.
history. When Rich Lowry of National Review said on Fox
that "millions and millions of people" were not aware that
Mary Cheney was gay until Mr. Kerry brought it up, it was
clear just which four million he was talking about. Mr.
Kerry, his critics all speculate, was deliberately seeking
to depress voter turnout among Mr. Rove's M.I.A. religious
conservatives by broadcasting Mary Cheney's sexuality to
them for the first time.

To buy this theory you have to believe that by this late
date a large group of potential voters obsessed with
homosexuality didn't yet know that Ms. Cheney is gay. I
find that preposterous, but only Mr. Kerry knows if he
thought so and if his intentions were so smarmily
Machiavellian. Even if they were, there's no ambiguity
about what the Bush campaign is up to. Mr. Rove can
out-Machiavelli Mr. Kerry anytime. Though the president
pays "compassionate conservative" lip service to
"tolerance" of homosexuality to appease suburban swing
voters, his campaign has pushed a gratuitous constitutional
amendment banning same-sex marriage, one opposed by Mary
Cheney's own father, to stir up as much fear and ugly rage
as it can.

When Mrs. Cheney hyperbolically implies that even using the
word lesbian in 2004 is a slur out of the McCarthy era - "a
cheap and tawdry political trick," she said - she is
playing a similar game. She is positioning lesbian as a
term comparable to child molester. But as Dave Cullen
writes in Salon: "It is not an insult to call a proudly
public lesbian a lesbian. It's an insult to gasp when
someone calls her a lesbian." Mrs. Cheney and her
surrogates are in effect doing exactly what Elizabeth
Edwards had the guts to say they were doing: they are
sending the message to Mr. Rove's four million that they
are ashamed of Mary Cheney. They are disowning her under
the guise of "defending" her. They are exploiting her for
the sake of political expediency even as they level that
charge at Democrats.

The deployment of homosexuality as a nasty campaign weapon
has long been second nature to Mr. Rove. In the must-read
article "Karl Rove in a Corner" in the November issue of
The Atlantic, the journalist Joshua Green exhaustively
researches the tightest campaigns of Mr. Rove's career and
exhumes the pattern. As Mr. Green reminds us, George W.
Bush's 1994 gubernatorial race against Ann Richards
"featured a rumor" that Governor Richards was a lesbian.
Gay whispers have also swirled around Rove adversaries like
a rival Republican campaign consultant in the 1980's and a
1994 Alabama judicial candidate who was branded a
"homosexual pedophile."

None of these rumors were, in fact, true, but Mary Cheney
is unambiguously and unapologetically gay. For a campaign
that wants to pander to the fringe, that makes her presence
in the Bush-Cheney family a problem - just how big a
problem can be seen by its disingenuously hysterical
reaction to Mr. Kerry's use of the L word. But Mary Cheney
isn't the only problem for Mr. Rove as he plays this game.
The Republican establishment is rife with gay people - just
ask anyone in proximity to its convention in New York - and
the campaign doesn't want the four million to know about
them, either. But in this election season, actual outing
has begun to creep onto the Internet, where the names of
closeted Republican congressmen and aides who support
anti-gay policies are a Google search away. Some named so
far - one of whom dropped out of his re-election campaign
in August - hail from districts where some of those four
million live.

Sooner or later this untenable level of hypocrisy is going
to lead to a civil war within the Republican party. But
this hypocrisy is not just about homosexuality - it's about
all sexuality, as befits a party that calls for the
elimination of Roe v. Wade and the suppression of candid
sex education that might prevent teenage pregnancy and AIDS
alike. Should Bill O'Reilly-Andrea Mackris tapes exist, as
many believe they do, we will learn graphically where the
right's most popular cultural defender of G-rated values
stands not only on lesbianism but also on extramarital sex,
sexual tourism in Asia and masturbation -which all figure
in the complainant's detailed description of her alleged
conversations with her boss. But anyone who fears that Mr.
O'Reilly has completely abandoned his political faith need
not worry. According to Ms. Mackris's account, the one time
this would-be Lothario succeeded in luring her to his hotel
room alone it was not by offering to show her his etchings,
or even Spectravision, but a televised news conference by
President Bush.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/24/arts/24rich.html?ex=1099393260&ei=1&en=dc927c75478dd3d9

Keith

Don't Fuck with me Keith - J. Mandeville

[wmw999 2,589]

A little more on this story (I went googling)

O'Reilly says that Mackris's lawyer offered to settle to keep it quiet story here

Fox tries to fire Andrea Mackris -- they say it's for extortion, and want a pre-emptive ruling that it's not retaliation: story here

There are, of course, many ways to look at this. She should have gone through internal channels on sexual harrassment before going public. That's what you do in companies. They're like everyone else, and they'd rather have the opportunity to fix things themselves first. Who here wants the FAA "helping us?"

On the other hand, if there is any substantiation in the form of tapes or corroboration from other employees, well, he's toast.

Wendy W.

There is nothing more dangerous than breaking a basic safety rule and getting away with it. It removes fear of the consequences and builds false confidence. (tbrown)

[diverdriver 7]

Quote

On the other hand, if there is any substantiation in the form of tapes or corroboration from other employees, well, he's toast.

Wendy W.

edit: Wendy I quoted you and you did balance your post both ways. My post is not directed at you.

So he's toast for talking dirty to more than one woman? That isn't sexual harasment.

And starting off with a press conference right as he came out with his book is BS timing. She should have gone with HR. What happened to innocent until proven guilty? Now, they start off with a press conference and he is guilty until he can prove his innocence. But sadly, he is damaged goods now and will be pushed to the side for this. If he's guilty he should pay the price but that hasn't been established. We all know that the innocent never get their name back after they are "cleared". This is a BS way of handling stuff like this.

Oh and why the hell would she go back to work for him after she left FOX once before? Now she's suddenly offended? I'm not buying this. Don't give me the "well it was a career move to go back." Yah, and after I stopped pounding nails into my eye I thought to myself it might be a good idea to do it again!

[PhreeZone 20]

>So he's toast for talking dirty to more than one woman? That isn't sexual harasment.

Actually if she told him to stop and he continued to do it then it is exactly what sexual harassment is. If any of the management at FOX knew about it and did nothing to stop the harassment or to counsel both parties then they are also going to be caught in this too.

I've had to sit in to enough stupid sexual harassment seminars that I know it is "Unwanted sexual behaivor even after it is brought to both parties attention that the advances or behavior is inapproriate". All it takes is saying "I'm not comfortable talking about this, please stop" and any further discussion on the topic is enough for harassment claims through most HR's.

Some states require the notice to be documented, others allow a verbal notice to work. If a third party is a witness to the notice then almost all states allow that.

In an industry where there are only 3-4 companies that she could work for its very limiting in career choices. Like if you leave your job you can only work for a few other carriers at the same level you are at now but if you hate your job every day at the new carrier you might be willing to go back if you thought the conditions had changed.

Yesterday is history
And tomorrow is a mystery

Parachutemanuals.com

[diverdriver 7]

Did she tell him to stop at any point before this? Nothing I've seen yet (not saying it doesn't exist) says that she told him to stop. Just, wham, lawsuit. To me, that's BS. Some people you can joke with more than others. If you get offended say so. Most people will stop. Those that can't control themselves should then be dealt with accordingly. This situation, imo, is a BS way to handle it.

[PhreeZone 20]

Accurding to her complaint during the same conversation that O'Reilly had about a Tailand Sexshow and getting with some hot Italian women on his upcoming trip to see the Pope protested but were afraid to do it too strongly since he was her boss.

Or just before the nice steamy shower talk "Despite informing him that she was not at all interested in the conversation, and despite her adamant refusal to participate in such talk, Defendant O'Reilly informed Plantiff Andrea Mackri that he was watching a porn movie and babbled perversely reguarding his fantasies... http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/1013043mackris16.html

I'd say that if its stated that you don't want to participate in a conversation that continuing to do it shows lack of control.

Yesterday is history
And tomorrow is a mystery

Parachutemanuals.com

[nacmacfeegle 0]

"I'd say that if its stated that you don't want to participate in a conversation that continuing to do it shows lack of control."

Aye, but how often do we see exactly that going on here....

--------------------

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. Thomas Jefferson

[diverdriver 7]

Ok, then this can be decided in the court if she has cause. I'm just tired of this shit being aired in press conferences before anything has been proven. But, that's not how things are done around here.

[wmw999 2,589]

Quote

I'd say that if its stated that you don't want to participate in a conversation that continuing to do it shows lack of control.

While what Nacmac said is true, well, if you're in a subordinate position at work, you can bend yourself into all kinds of directions if you want to keep your job. Or if you just want to stay with the team -- it's hard to cut someone off sometimes. Girls particularly are trained from birth (at least I was) to be polite; cutting someone off and telling them to shut up is about the ultimate in rudeness. Doesn't make it OK to just keep listening and then go to the press, but just a little background.

She still should have gone through internal channels though.

Wendy W.

There is nothing more dangerous than breaking a basic safety rule and getting away with it. It removes fear of the consequences and builds false confidence. (tbrown)