Sometimes politics makes sense. Other times, the latest headline will make you feel like you just woke up from a long nap and aren’t awake yet.

Take today’s entry in the sweepstakes. “New Republic magazine pulls down homophobic op-ed about Pete Buttigieg by an openly gay literary critic – The author argued that because Buttigieg waited until his early 30s to come out as gay, he would be too preoccupied with sex and drugs to be an effective president.”

The New Republic has retracted a vulgar and homophobic op-ed about Pete Buttigieg by openly gay literary critic Dale Peck.

The magazine had published the piece, titled “My Mayor Pete Problem,” on its website on Friday.

In the piece, Peck described Buttigieg as “the gay equivalent of Uncle Tom,” and he referred to the presidential candidate as “Mary Pete” throughout the column.

Is it homophobic?

Conservatives often play the “What if” game. As in, what if lefties were treated the way righties are. It sometimes does happen. 

Peck is actually attacking Buttigieg for being insufficiently left-wing and not the right kind of gay. The piece is a terrible mess. It looks like something that should have run in the Village Voice or the New York Press. 

But the Gawkerized version of the New Republic is social justice garbage and in an era of journalism where the Washington Post thinks a Tumblr essay about how the Lion King is just like Hitler is fitting content, you can see why this mistake was made.

Why did The New Republic think this was appropriate? Because it was largely dressed up as a lefty attack on someone to the right of the author.

Mary Pete is a neoliberal and a Jeffersonian meritocrat, which is to say he’s just another unrepentant or at least unexamined beneficiary of white male privilege… Like Kirsten Gillibrand, he believes in “healthy capitalism,” which is a bit like saying you believe in “healthy cancer”… He seems perfectly content to dismiss left-wing student activists as “social justice warriors” despite the fact that this phrase is paradigmatic in right-wing discourse… 

In short, the Left has very bad filters when it comes to inappropriate content packaged in socialist rants.

And there are at least some consequences.

The League of Conservation Voters is cutting ties with an upcoming forum on climate change after its co-host for the event, The New Republic, published an “offensive” article about Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg.

Gene Karpinski, LCV’s president, said in a statement Saturday that the piece about Buttigieg and The New Republic’s decision to run it “are inconsistent with our values.”
LCV, a high-profile environmental group that has spent years lobbying for tougher action on climate change, had signed on to co-host a 240-minute discussion about the issue for the current presidential candidates at a forum in September. Media site Gizmodo is set to co-host the event with The New Republic.

Two Gawker sewers for the price of one.

Win McCormack, who brought The New Republic, after Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes murdered it, has apologized. Just not for the right thing.

Here’s the backstory: In the 1970s, Portland, Oregon, mayor Neil Goldschmidt started sleeping with his kids’ babysitter. She was 14 when it started. It didn’t become public, but it also wasn’t a well-guarded secret. Goldschmidt took her to parties with other power brokers in the state, but no one said anything. 

McCormack has long been a large contributor to statewide and national campaigns. In October, for example, he gave what the Oregon Follow the Money Project says is the biggest single political contribution in the state’s history: $1 million to America Coming Together, a Democratic get-out-the-vote operation. McCormack told WW he learned of Goldschmidt’s secret not long after the governor’s surprise announcement in 1990. “The brother of a friend of mine was dating [Susan] when Goldschmidt said he wasn’t going to run again,” recalls McCormack. “He said, ‘Let me tell you the real reason he isn’t running.'” With his journalistic experience, McCormack knew what a huge story he had been handed. Still, he chose to do nothing. “I didn’t feel like it was my business, and even though I don’t like Neil, I didn’t want to destroy him,” McCormack says.

McCormack says he never shared the secret, even though Goldschmidt’s surprise decision remained perhaps the greatest mystery in Oregon politics over the past 15 years.

There are a lot of Jeffrey Epsteins and the media covers for them until it becomes convenient to finally cover the story.

That should be the real scandal here. Not “Mary Pete”.