Politics: Dowd Did It

Maureen Down hits the nail on the head about Nino Scalia and his little problem with the last fifty or so years of social progress. I'm sure I've got a nice rant in me about this (it began to take shape over drinks and dogs this afternoon), I think she really hit it, and touches on the larger point I believe is of critical importance.

Most Americans, even Republicans, have a more tolerant and happy vision of the country than Mr. Scalia and other nattering nabobs of negativism. Their jeremiads yearn for an airbrushed 50's America that never really existed. (The pedophile scandal in the Catholic Church, which condemns homosexuality, proves that.) And the America they feared — everyone having orgies, getting stoned and burning the flag — never came to pass.

Nino is too blinded by his own bloviation to notice that Americans are not as censorious as he is. They like the complicated national mosaic — that Dick Cheney has a gay daughter, that Jeb Bush has a Latina wife, that Clarence Thomas has a white wife. Newt Gingrich can leave two wives for younger women and Bill (Virtues) Bennett can blow $8 million on slot machines. Even those who did not like Bill Clinton cringed at Ken Starr's giddy voyeurism.

That's something that I'm banking on, frankly. I believe that if the whole world realized how much this administration and modern ultra-conservativism has sold the world a bill of fare. Americans don't hate their gay friends and neighbors. Americans don't think that all the black people should stay in the back of the bus.

But they don't see that Bush and his model justices Scalia and Thomas are all pushing -- despite the progress of the last three or four decades -- a near-Victorian view of America.

In the immortal words of Mr. Ice-T, before he became a washout cog in the Law and Order machine, "Sh*t ain't like that!"