The Bride of Finkelstein:
When it was announced noted right-wing pollster and uber-strategist, Likudophile, and sucker of cock Arthur Finkelstein was going to devote some of the time he wasn't bobbin' on the knob of his newly-married male spouse on attacking Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton stepped up to put a smackdown on the Republican cumgobbler. Said Big Balls Bill of Finkelstein's anti-Hillary campaign, "I was sad. I mean, there were two stories. One is that he went to Massachusetts and married his longtime male partner, and then he comes back here and announces this. I thought one of two things: Either this guy believes his party is not serious and is totally Machiavellian in its position [on gay rights], or you know, as David Brock said in his great book Blinded by the Right, there's some sort of self-loathing or something. I was more sad for him."

Some Republicans and right-wingers, people who give a shit less about gays unless they can be used as political props, were predictably pissy about Clinton's remarks, calling it "an out-of-bounds personal attack" and "gay-baiting." Christopher Barron, political consultant of the wang-eating, carpet-munching, self-deluded Log Cabin Republicans, attempted to make his group valid again to its straight and/or closeted masters by saying, "The real outrage is that we have a politician using someone's personal life for partisan political gain." (Although one might ask what political gain Bill Clinton needs. But, you know, when your ass is filled with dick even as you enable the very people who are trying to yank that dick out of your ass, it can be a mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up world.)

Let's not make this about all the poor, self-loathing gay Republicans, whose very existence is used to pander to the worst in the constituency of the party. They are just pathetic, in a sad Andrew Sullivan sort of way. (For a real laugh, read Sullivan whenever he gets on his high horse about Republican condemnation of gay marriage. Feel free to feel superior.) No, no, let's focus in for a moment or two on Arthur Finkelstein, the kind of gay villain who, if created for a film, would be burned in effigy by most of the gay community.

Finkelstein helped perfect the attack politics of the Lee Atwater school. Along with Atwater, Finkelstein made the word "liberal" into a perjorative. In Al D'Amato's first Senate campaign, in the Republican primary, against the beloved moderate (when that meant "not fucking insane") Jacob Javits, Finkelstein devised a strategy "to raise questions with 'concerned Republicans' about Mr. Javits's liberal voting record and his health. The 43-year-old Mr. D'Amato is offered as a young and vigorous alternative with mainstream Republican views. Mr. Javits, 76, acknowledges suffering from motor neuron disease, an ailment that affects his leg muscles and makes walking difficult."

More well-known is Finkelstein's use of Jew-baiting push polls in a 1978 South Carolina race for Congress between Finkelstein's candidate, Carroll Campbell, and Democrat Max Heller: "In a report, [Democratic strategist Alan] Baron said Arthur Finkelstein of New York, who was Mr. Campbell's polltaker, told him that he had done a survey to, in Mr. Baron's words, 'determine the impact on voters of information that Heller was (1) a Jew; (2) a foreign-born Jew; and (3) a foreign-born Jew who did not believe in Jesus Christ as the savior.'" Finkelstein got Benjamin Netanyahu elected in Israel in 1996 in part by pandering to Israeli fears, calling Shimon Peres "weak" on terrorism: "Commercials with Peres and Yasser Arafat walking hand in hand followed by scenes from suicide bombings in Tel Aviv were credited with swaying the vote to Netanyahu." This not to mention Finkelstein's work getting Jesse Helms elected.

Less known is Finkelstein's role in convincing an outed Republican homosexual from running for Congress. In 1980, Robert E. Bauman was heading for re-election for his fourth term from a Maryland district when it was revealed that he had solicited sex from a teenage boy. He lost, but when he talked about campaigning again in 1982, even though polls showed he could beat the Democrat in office, Finkelstein "told me it would be brutal, that I couldn't imagine the kinds of things I would have to put up with. He was right, I couldn't. It was everything he said it would be and more." Such a mensch, this bonelicker, Finkelstein.

So now he turns his semen-crusted leer towards defeating Hillary Clinton in her Senate re-election so that she can't even think about running for President. As Salon points out, the first salvo in Finkelstein's war, well, for lack of a more descriptive, but yet somehow strangely apt, word, sucks. An amateur hour, content-free couple of pages that is simply there to beg for money. Its "news" section contains this strangely retro-sounding line: "Stop Her Now is spearheading a nationwide campaign to educate every American and expose Hillary Clinton as the radical socialist she really is."

And perhaps one should ask how many of the people Finkelstein is hoping to convince would have a problem with, say, Finkelstein's monogamous, legal, gay marriage. How many would be convinced that Hillary Clinton is a dangerous radical when she's in a straight marriage that, to their definition, doesn't undermine the foundations of American society? How many of them would vote to allow their states to recognize Finkelstein's marriage should he want to leave the confines of his expansive Massachusetts estate? How many of them wouldn't want to just kick his faggot ass even as they call Hillary a "bitch" and a "dyke"?