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Next entry: Friday Random Ten “Can I Retire A Millionaire If I Destroy The Economy?” Edition Previous entry: No Matter How Bad It Gets

Condi was a no-go for McCain veep because of lesbian rumors

Condi sure as hell would have been a more credible pick than the train wreck from Wasilla, even with Dr. Rice’s role in the Iraq debacle and Bush’s

torture

enhanced interrogation techniques policy. (PageOneQ):

McCain’s inner circle argued “furiously” for Rice to be his running mate instead of one-time top contenders Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee and Tim Pawlenty. However, according to the RNC source, persistent rumors about Rice’s sexual orientation took her out of the running. “In Washington circles,” the source said, “it’s just assumed Rice is gay and nobody really cares. But in the glare of the media spotlight, those rumors were bound to get magnified a thousandfold and the mainstream media would have had an excuse to reveal the facts that would have caused conniption fits among the Republican base.”

Rice, as Provost of Stanford University long before she was on the Bush cabinet, jointly owned a California house and held a line of credit with documentary filmmaker Randy Bean, with whom Rice has said she bonded over a “mutual love of football.”

Whether or not her relationship with Bean means Condi is light in the loafers is not the point,” the source added. “It’s hard to prove one way or another. The fact is that by the time the media finished dissecting it, not a Christian conservative in the country would have gone to the polls in November and that’s ultimately what nixed the Rice candidacy.”

Note the anonymous source makes a reference to “light in the loafers”—huh? How does that refer to a lesbian? Shouldn’t it be more like “heavy in the Manolo Blahniks?”

Mike Signorile:

Many of you will remember back to September of last year when Washington Post diplomatic correspondent Glenn Kessler broke the news on my show that Condi Rice owned a home with another woman.

He’d written a biography of Rice, and I surely wasn’t his first interview (though I was in that first dozen or so, probably, since it was the week the book was published). And yet, I was the first one to ask about some curious facts he’d unearthed and which were prominent in his introduction and then later in the book, regarding Rice’s ownership of a home with a woman described as her closest female friend, Randy Bean, a Democrat and filmmaker who worked at Stanford. The two had actually owned the home with Rice’s other best friend, a gay man who worked in the Clinton administration, Coit D. Blacker, a Stanford professor, who eventually sold his share to the two women. Even if Rice and the also-unmarried Bean weren’t in a relationship, the fact that her second closest friend is a gay man (and also a Democrat) was quite fascinating.

Also:
* LCR chides ‘gay left’ for discussing John McCain’s gay chief of staff

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Posted by Pam Spaulding on 09:00 AM • (50) Comments

How does that refer to a lesbian?

I don’t think these people actually understand the nuance of phraseology like “light in the loafers.” All they know is, it’s used to describe Teh Fagzorz, so it’s probably applicable to Condi as well.

I mean, we are talking about an “RNC source,” so it’s likely that this person isn’t really all that thoughtful.

Comment #1: spencer  on  09/26  at  09:19 AM

And so instead they chose Sarah Palin, scandal cluster bomb that she is?  Well damn.

Comment #2: Neil the Ethical Werewolf  on  09/26  at  09:24 AM

The horrifying thing is that if McCain had picked Rice—Condaleeza Fucking Rice—he probably would be walking away with this election.  Christ, what a madhouse.

Comment #3: forked tongue  on  09/26  at  09:36 AM

It’s “fascinating” that her closest male friend is gay?  I mean, do these guys live under a rock or something?

Comment #4: speedbudget  on  09/26  at  09:39 AM

Hey, if their own homophobia ends up helping to torpedo the Rethugs I say- sweeeeet.

Comment #5: Steve LaBonne  on  09/26  at  09:41 AM

I just don’t understand close personal relationships that cross deep ideological divides like that between Democrats and Republicans these days.  A couple generations ago, sure. And for that matter, even these days there are certain strands of Democrats who really don’t differ that deeply from moderate Republicans, especially in the higher circles of corporate, governmental, and presumably academic policy wonkery. But crossing that line certainly makes one suspect to the hard-right core of Republicans, and I guess I am demonstrating the mirror image of that here.

I dunno, it could just be that I’ve had a very limited number of sexual relationships in my life, but in every case, no matter how brief and shallow the relationship, at least I was always sure she would vote pretty much the way I would, and that she agreed that the other side in every election would be a disaster. Nor did I make sure of this by restricting myself to known Democrats/progressives; it just worked out that every woman with whom I made a connection was, well, what I’d call sensible about these things.

So for me personally the weird thing isn’t that one of the Republican Party’s more competent and credible people might well be gay, but that she’d hang out with a Democrat. Or two. Of course it makes sense that that’s where she’d find people she could be comfortable with personally, but then frankly it seems weird (but not really too surprising) that either Bean or Blacker would put up with her.

Sigh. Well there is always the Carvelle/Matalin marriage to contemplate. Or in my case, avoid contemplating.

How can anyone relax and feel safe in bed with someone with diametrically opposed views about the world and how it should be run—unless perhaps they mutually don’t really take such things very seriously, and how can someone not take it seriously unless they both feel elevated above the common run of humanity who have to live with the real-world consequences of policy decisions?

So I guess I can see how genuinely elitist people can screw across party lines—what the hell, they are screwing everyone anyway, right?

If we wind up with Sarah Palin (or McCain for that matter) running things, I might consider regretting the way that the bees in the American Right’s bonnet forced their party to play double or nothing like this. But since Obama remains ahead and I therefore hope for a sane outcome, hopefully it works out for the best. Perhaps VP-soon-to-be President Rice would have been a measurable improvement on Palin, but we are just talking different flavors of bad here, and I can’t say that the hypocrisy demonstrated by such “moderate Republicans” as Rice and others we could name, willing to throw other people in their same position under the bus to buy a secret special status for themselves, is any less disgusting than the forthight insanity of the Church Lady.

Comment #6: Mark Foxwell  on  09/26  at  09:43 AM

I’m amazed at gay and lesbian people who support Republicans, but at least I can understand how they personally can get ahead while throwing their brothers and sisters under the bus (much like Ann Coulter or Phyllis Schlaffley can make a name for themselves as the token women whose main job is to bash women). But I am utterly baffled as to how any of them find partners. Who would love or sleep with somebody like that? Haven’t they just reduced their dating pool to only self-hating or closeted Republicans (probably a larger group than we know)?

Comment #7: mothworm  on  09/26  at  09:46 AM

It’s always fascinated me the way that the simple fact of not being married, or of never marrying, carries a certain taint in electoral politics.  Which isn’t to say whether I actually think Rice is a lesbian or not.  But the same sorts of things were said about Ed Koch when he was mayor of New York—he even had to be given a high profile ‘girlfriend’ because the shock of *gasp* someone who made it into middle age without ever getting married!!!11!!! was too much for the public to bear.

Who cares? 

(And, yes, I know the Republican Base cares, but then the ticket would be contaminated in their eyes by Rice being black, first and foremost.  And then it would be the fact that she’s a woman who doesn’t even pay lip service on knowing her place—the only reason they’re OK with Palin is that she’s a married mother of 5 who started politics as a PTA-active homemaker and isn’t embarrassed to be seen publicly asking major world leaders about their children. Lesbianism would be a distant third for them.)

Comment #8: The Opoponax  on  09/26  at  10:17 AM

“It’s hard to prove one way or another. The fact is that by the time the media finished dissecting it, not a Christian conservative in the country would have gone to the polls in November and that’s ultimately what nixed the Rice candidacy.”

The woman is Secretary of State. Right now. I am trying very hard to figure out my reaction to this. I don’t doubt the above statement for a minute. It just boggles my mind that I can believe that the same press that would eat her alive as a potential VP pick is utterly silent today.

It is proof that 90% of all this stuff is horse-race horseshit. The people who would “care” about this are the people fighting the hardest to be allowed not to know.

Comment #9: Lymis  on  09/26  at  10:22 AM

They wouldn’t hold her incompetence against her but they will her gayness?

Comment #10: merl  on  09/26  at  10:25 AM

Oh there’s no way.  These folks are right—-even if they couldn’t provide Rice is a lesbian, she is a single woman over 22, and so the wingnuts are going to be suspicious of her.  There’s a reason they can abide a female running mate, but not a female preacher—-because they believe that women are morally and spiritually incompetent and need direct male supervision.  Look what happened to Harriet Miers.  If Rice is a lesbian, and the evidence is strong in that direction, then there’s no way she could keep a lid on it.

Comment #11: Amanda Marcotte  on  09/26  at  10:37 AM

Shouldn’t it be more like “heavy in the Manolo Blahniks?”

“Repairing transmissions in the plaid flannel?”

Comment #12: Sour Kraut  on  09/26  at  10:41 AM

They wouldn’t hold her incompetence against her but they will her gayness?

merl, Condi’s incompetence just wrecks our standing in the world, our relations with other countries, and gets people killed for no good reason.  It’s not something really important, like who she’s having sex with.

Comment #13: Sour Kraut  on  09/26  at  10:45 AM

Shouldn’t it be more like “heavy in the Manolo Blahniks?”

The anonymous source was clearly reaching for “sensible shoes” but couldn’t find the euphenism he was looking for.

And, in any case, say what you want about Condi, she does have good taste in footwear.

Comment #14: Tyro  on  09/26  at  10:46 AM

What incompetence? She’s loyal to her commander in chief.

It sounds as if Rice is closeted regardless of her orientation. And once again we see where the closet leads you: destroying your credibility and self-respect by fronting for jerkwads.

Comment #15: paul  on  09/26  at  11:16 AM

This is yet another annoying example of how keeping homosexuality as a pejorative serves to inhibit hets as well as gays.  What the hell is wrong with two people of the same gender seeking the many cost-sharing, life-sharing and friendship advantages of cohabitation and home ownership that married people get?  Nothing, save for the fact that many people will be deterred by finger-pointing and rumours.

Note also the probably-not-unintended-consequence of making marital and quasi-marital, child-producing relationships the only legitimate ones.  The mandatory default setting seems to be “if you ain’t fucking or breeding then you are an Outsider”.

As for Secretary Rice, I rather think that the time demands placed on a US SecState leave her any time to lounge around her home in California, whether she has a lover there or not.

Comment #16: seeker6079  on  09/26  at  11:26 AM

As a potential politician, Rice has huge negatives that have nothing to do with her sexuality. She’s tied to the disastrous war, and personally, she comes off as ice-cold, with a perpetual scowl (although I’ve read that in person, she can be quite warm and funny).

The only thing she would have going for her is that, as a black woman, she would somehow defuse the uniqueness of Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s candidacies. McCain and/or his advisers rightly figured that this would not be enough.

But Pam, even though I don’t really agree with your premise, that “Manolo Blahniks” line was priceless.

Comment #17: Bitter Scribe  on  09/26  at  11:50 AM

“jointly owned a California house and held a line of credit with documentary filmmaker Randy Bean”

Better that then 12 homes and 15 cars, or whatever McCain owns….

Comment #18: anoNY  on  09/26  at  12:02 PM

Rice is not incompetent; I don’t have a clear sense of what her policies actually are, but I’d like to think that if she were serving a better President than Bush, she’d be much more respected than she is now. I don’t know if I’m right about that, of course. Anyway, she’s an intellect to be reckoned with, and the fact that she was passed over for the VP slot because she might be gay just goes to show how bad the pandering to the religious right has gotten in this country as of late. If they end up being hoist by their own petard, the ironing will be delicious indeed.

Comment #19: J.V.  on  09/26  at  12:05 PM

Eh, I’ve never heard that anybody at Stanford thought she was any giant intellect. She was promoted because she toadied to the university president (see a pattern there?) and by most accounts she made a hash of her job.

Comment #20: Steve LaBonne  on  09/26  at  12:14 PM

Shouldn’t it be more like “heavy in the <strike>Manolo Blahniks</strike> Ferragamos?”

Lesbian or not, she’s still an abominable person.

Comment #21: stryx  on  09/26  at  12:18 PM

“The anonymous source was clearly reaching for “sensible shoes” but couldn’t find the euphenism he was looking for.”

Describing a man as “light in the loafers” is a known way of saying that he’s gay, or at least effeminate.  Unfortunately for the anonymous source, the phrase is pretty well restricted to gay men, so using it to imply that Rice is a lesbian comes off as hella weird.  It’s not really a common enough phrase to have become automatically synonymous with “homosexual”; it still has a gender attached to it, and the gender it’s attached to doesn’t match the subject to which it was applied.

Comment #22: preying mantis  on  09/26  at  12:18 PM

Well, this confirms what anyone paying the slightest bit of attention could have surmised.

Comment #23: Steve M.  on  09/26  at  12:26 PM

preying mantis: I know. The thing is that in the same way that “light in the loafers” is a way of saying that a man is gay or effeminate, saying that a woman is the sort who wears “sensible shoes” is a way of saying that she’s lesbian or sexually undesireable. The funny thing being that the metaphor wouldn’t even fit for Rice because she doesn’t actually choose “sensible shoes” as her preferred footwear.

Comment #24: Tyro  on  09/26  at  12:30 PM

Heavy in the Birkenstocks.

Comment #25: Dan Almont  on  09/26  at  12:40 PM

“I’ve never heard that anybody at Stanford thought she was any giant intellect. She was promoted because she toadied to the university president”

Yeesh, you mean she got her job the same way every other creep at a university climbs the ladder?  I’m really amazed.  Truly.

Comment #26: seeker6079  on  09/26  at  12:41 PM

Who cares?

I’m a Floridian.  Everyone I know is pretty sure Governor Crist is gay, and nobody really cares.  In fact, there was a collective sigh of relief when he wasn’t chosen as McCain’s running-mate, in the hope that it means he won’t have to go through with a sham marriage.  I’m not wild about his politics and I certainly didn’t vote for him, but after 8 years of a Bush in charge, he’s practically a breath of fresh air.

As for Secretary Rice, I might agree that she’d be a better politician/leader in the service of someone who wasn’t corrupt and incompetent, but I’m just not sure.  No one who is close enough personally to the Bush clan to have earned her own nickname is trustworthy in my opinion.

Comment #27: Lee  on  09/26  at  12:48 PM

The two had actually owned the home with Rice’s other best friend, a gay man who worked in the Clinton administration, Coit D. Blacker, a Stanford professor

Wow, talk about your equal opportunity smear job. This story will turn conservatives against Rice for allegedly being gay, and liberals against this gay scholar/Clintonite for allegedly being Rice’s second-best friend. How could you betray our trust, Coit D. Blacker?!

Comment #28: Matt  on  09/26  at  01:46 PM

Really, lesbian rumors quashed it? I would have thought that the potential political realization that black+woman is a better wedge than woman+moose killing is would have been all it took to seal the deal. It’s not like actual fitness for office ever came into the discussions.

http://thesebastards.blogspot.com/

Comment #29: Matthew  on  09/26  at  01:53 PM

I can’t figure out why they would include the “mutual love of football” line, except as another attempt to slander her, but it seems like a damn odd way to do it.  There are plenty of women that watch football; in fact I think if that comment had any basis in fact then about 60% the women in Pittsburgh would be lesbian outright.  And that might be a charitably low guess.

The only other thing I can think of is that it might be some sort of innuendo, but considering that football involves watching a bunch of athletic, burly men, I can’t imagine how they get lesbian out of that either.

Comment #30: luzzleanne  on  09/26  at  02:03 PM

And, in any case, say what you want about Condi, she does have good taste in footwear.

Yep, I’m told that the shoes she was picking out whlie New Orleans was being destroyed were lovely.

Comment #31: Lizard  on  09/26  at  02:24 PM

If they end up being hoist by their own petard, the ironing will be delicious indeed.

Mmmm…. starchy goodness…..

Comment #32: sunsin  on  09/26  at  02:33 PM

The idea of a queer woman of color choosing to be a Republican is blowing my mind. Sometimes I just do not understand people’s decisions.

Comment #33: Lauren O  on  09/26  at  03:08 PM

Condoleexxa Rice has never run for public office or been elected to anything.  Her speaking style is pure professorial-at-a-seminar.  She might make a great vice president or president, but there’s no indication she’d make a good presidential or vice presidential candidate.

I have no idea whether Dr Rice is gay.  She might just be not very interested in sex, period; the assumption that, because she has no known heterosexual partner she must be gay seems more projection than evidentiary.

Comment #34: Dana  on  09/26  at  03:09 PM

Oops!  Condoleezza, not Condoleexxa!

Comment #35: Dana  on  09/26  at  03:10 PM

She might make a great vice president or president, but there’s no indication she’d make a good presidential or vice presidential candidate.

A great vice president or president?  Please.  Rice couldn’t even figure out how to get Russia to back down during the Georgia crisis, and the Soviet Union was her area of expertise when she was a professor.  A crisis happened in the area she specialized in and she still had no clue what the hell to do about it.

Comment #36: Mnemosyne  on  09/26  at  03:26 PM

The idea of a queer woman of color choosing to be a Republican is blowing my mind. Sometimes I just do not understand people’s decisions.

It’s the Faustian bargain that many gay Republicans have to make: a lifetime in the closet in exchange for money, power and influence as part of the rightwing power structure.  It can offer a measure of protection—albeit a false one given the GOP’s policies—but only as long as you toe the line for the Party.  Depending on who you are and who you know, that thin veil of safety can and will be revoked in an instant for someone who challenges the arrangement.

Comment #37: Sour Kraut  on  09/26  at  03:53 PM

lets see, they had their choice between an unqualified white woman, a highly qualified Black woman, and a qualified but loathesome Jewish man whose divorce from his former party wasn’t finalized yet.

Guess what they picked!

Comment #38: Ms Kate  on  09/26  at  03:57 PM

Heavy in the Manolo Blahniks!  Classic!

Comment #39: Laureli  on  09/26  at  04:32 PM

She isn’t gay.  One time she said something like “I have to speak about that to my husb-. . .the president”.  How would a gay woman be thinking in such a way as to say something like that?  Now, I give no credence to the rumors that President Bush is sleeping with Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, but even if those rumors are false, I believe they are, a gay woman wouldn’t be referring to a man as her “husb-”.

Comment #40: Mike Toreno  on  09/26  at  05:00 PM

I don’t see how having a gay male friend would make Condie a lesbian. My sister’s best male friend was gay because all of her other male friends were trying to get into her pants. She just liked having guy friends, without the drama. I suppose it reassured her boyfriends, though.

And unrelated people getting together to buy a house in the Bay Area was reasonably common, when it took two (or more) incomes to do it. I knew three such partnerships. Typically,  after five years, the partners cashed out, with enough money to buy their own places.

Further, believe it or not, even some straight women see no attraction in being some man’s wife. And there are women of any orientation who have no desire to reproduce.

Comment #41: Hector B.  on  09/26  at  05:12 PM

Condi would have been a better pick than Palin?

Understatement of the year.  The barista at my favorite coffee shop would have been a more credible pick than Palin.

I wonder if the Queen Moose is going to develop appedicitis on Wednesday night or Thurday morning, prompting a sudden cancellation of the Obama Victory Pa… er Vice Presidential Debate.

Comment #42: DTG in STL  on  09/26  at  05:43 PM

M-m-m-m-m, Rice and Bean.

Comment #43: Double D  on  09/26  at  05:45 PM

I don’t see how having a gay male friend would make Condie a lesbian.

Gay cooties.

Comment #44: Pesto  on  09/26  at  05:50 PM

They didn’t need to hunt for any other reason than <GoodlingFrowneyFace>she’s pro-choice.</GoodlingFrowneyFace>

Comment #45: Craig Pennington  on  09/26  at  06:07 PM

Well, I was a student at Stanford when Condi was provost.  She was well respected, and she’s been a horrible disappointment to me as she seems to put supporting W over putting her “country first”.

Strangely, it all seems like the Star Trek episode where the Federation agent tried to unite a planet’s people by using Nazism.  He thought he could use the “good” without getting genocide. 

Condi’s managed to turn us into a relatively good approximation of the USSR—gulags, torture, Pravda-like press, one party forever, governing by fear, economy shot to hell…

Comment #46: Caren-Sun-blocking Creator of Animorphic Pancakes  on  09/26  at  06:54 PM

filmmaker Randy Bean, with whom Rice has said she bonded over a “mutual love of football.”

There it is, proof positive that football gives you teh ghey. 

I mean, I can see it happening for guys, what with all the hypnotically undulating male buttocks and all, but for women too?  Who knew?

Comment #47: Captain Bathrobe  on  09/26  at  07:31 PM

Condi’s managed to turn us into a relatively good approximation of the USSR—gulags, torture, Pravda-like press, one party forever, governing by fear, economy shot to hell…

The extreme irony of that being that she’s fluent in Russian, and her leading area of expertise in foreign affairs prior to her work in the Bush Administration was Russia and the former USSR.

Comment #48: DTG in STL  on  09/26  at  07:50 PM

Mnemosyne ” Rice couldn’t even figure out how to get Russia to back down during the Georgia crisis, and the Soviet Union was her area of expertise when she was a professor.  A crisis happened in the area she specialized in and she still had no clue what the hell to do about it. “


You mean, unlike Obama, whose 1st response was “Take it to the U.N.,  oh, yeah, they have the veto.”

Comment #49: tomonthebay  on  09/26  at  09:50 PM

M-m-m-m-m, Rice and Bean.    - Double D on 09/26 at 04:45 PM

And it’s Double D for the win!

Comment #50: hbsweet, empress of ice cream  on  09/26  at  11:43 PM
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