Too much of anything

I'm a huge fan of the "wedge issue" in politics. Not only does a well-conceived wedge issue split your opponent's base, but a really successful one inflicts upon the opposing party the self-indulgent and internally-divisive belief they would have been victorious if only the lower-evolved members of the party hadn't been fooled by an obvious ploy.

Party members from say ... Kansas.

Although, there is a dark side to the application of the wedge. And I don't mean the elevation of issues that aren't really important, the demonizing of minority groups or even the reckless appeal to the basest of voter emotion -- that's all just part of what makes politics fun.

The problem is wedge issues can be addictive and, as is usually the case with addiction, the addict doesn't always realize when he has stopped being fun-at-the-party, election-winning guy and become shirt-button-askew, saying-strange-things in a stupor guy.

The gay marriage issue may (or may not) have been an effective wedge issue for the Republicans in 04, theoretically pulling some religious minded working class and black voters away from their natural Democratic home.

But spare us the constitutional crisis, revisited.

I'm sure the founders would be perplexed and repulsed by the idea of gay marriage. Yet, they would probably wretch into their three-pointed hats if they knew politicians wanted to sully up their defining document with a gratuitous amendment in reaction to this alien concept.

President Bush started up part two of the gay marriage debut, but he did so with a listlessness rarely seen outside the big cat family.

Not so the Republicans in Congress. Louisiana Senator David Vitter declared there was no bigger issue facing the United States Senate, if not the country, than passing a gay marriage ban. While I personally don't think the world should stop so we can fix the up Gulf Coast, if I was a voter in Louisiana I'd certainly want my Senator at least to pretend this was his point of view -- and you can't do that when you are hyperventilating about gay marriage.

That's nothing compared to the stunt Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe pulled today in the US Senate. Trotting out a large picture of himself, his wife, his children and his grandchildren, Inhofe declared in the "recorded" history of his family not only has there been no divorces but no homosexual relationships of any kind (here's the video of the epic declaration.)

For all I know he is correct. Or maybe he has a different kind of definition of what relationship is. But I'm left to wonder how he can be so confident as to declare this in front of all of his colleagues, and now the world. His family is quite large and recorded history goes back a long way.

Has his family always operated on the honor system or has there been some Inhofe family homosexuality test since the beginning of recorded history?

I can't imagine how a test like that would work, but if anyone was to find out, it could be big trouble for the Senator. It could even develop into a wedge issue, if it turns out such testing is commonplace among religious conservatives in congress.