Kolbe Gets Probed (and isn’t it an interesting choice of words…)

Link: NBC exclusive: Feds probe Kolbe on pages’ trip.

I have no love for Kolbe. But if there isn’t more smoke here that some political hack saying that Kolbe acted a little creepy and stroked some dude’s arm funny on a camping trip that included some half-dozen adults and two former pages, this is a witch hunt. I sincerely hope that there are allegations from the former pages involved or something to justify this, otherwise I’ll have to conclude that the great GOP Gay Offical Purge is in full swing.

Such a purge isn’t solely a bad thing; it puts the nasty fascist hatred at the heart of the modern conservative movement on public display. And I’ve always been disgusted by the self-hating ‘Log Cabiners’ who support the GOP even as the GOP reviles, demonizes, and attacks the rights of those with other than normative sexual orientations or identification. It’s well past time for that particular hypocrisy to end. But in the process, many fine men and women are going to have their reputations attacked, their lives upended, and face the gang-rape machine that is criminal investigation and its idiot-savant side-kick the media circus.

Kolbe himself, by all accounts of those who knew him and worked with him over his long years of public service, is a decent and honorable man. I certainly hope that he is exonerated of these apparently baseless speculations. But even if he is, a long record of public service (no matter how much you disagree with some of its results, or find it to be less than distinguished) will have been dragged through the mud for no other purpose, I suspect, than to divert attention away from the PR jugular wound that is Foleygate.

But the purge may accellerate from here. I’m hearing rumors that the next shoe to drop is Dennis Hastert will be coming out as a homosexual in a marriage of convenience. It is said that he has been living with top aide in a DC apartment for some years, and that his ‘wife’ stays in a hotel when visiting. The word is that he is about to be conclusively outted by a wrathful GOP and will resign early next week. I know. My first reaction was also "Jabba the Hastert, gay? Ewwww." But maybe he’s a lot more lovable as a bear than as a Speaker. If any of this is true, it will make Kolbe’s woes page 13 news by comparison. It will also mark a definitive point of no return for the GOP’s Gay Official Purge.

UPDATE: As I think on the spectacle of an ongoing and outright purge of gays from the GOP, I reflect that history demonstrates that there is little that entertains the safely orthodox masses more than a public auto de fe. I wonder if burning the perverts at the stake might be just the sort of bloody contrition that the GOP needs right now to mollify the Christian right and keep them coming to the polls in November. There have been reports of growing disaffection in the religious base of the GOP; one wonders if this is all a wisely timed sacrifice of a widely despised faction. One thing is for certain, hanging the faggots from the yardarms will excite the base to the point that they could well phase change to a vapor state.