The Woody Wallow And 'Family Values'

AUSTIN — My first chance to catch up on Woody and Mia. What a wallow! Holy cow.

In this sunny political season, when the Republicans are working to make ''family values" an issue - since they haven't got anything else going for them - poor Woody and Mia, on top of all their other problems, are now being sucked into the political vortex.

U.S. Rep. Newt Gingrich, a thoroughly nasty man, said in the course of introducing President Bush this weekend, "I call this the Woody Allen plank. It's a weird situation, and it fits the Democratic Party platform perfectly. If a Democrat used the word family to raise children in Madison Square Garden, half their party would have rebelled, and the other half would not vote. Woody Allen had non-incest with his non-daughter because they were a non-family."

I know, I know, the sophisticated media cynic is supposed to take a statement like that in stride, insisting it's all just your normal political exaggeration, innuendo and smear. I'm such a sissy, I was stopped cold by it.

There have been, in our great nation, murderers who were registered Republicans, child abusers who were registered Republicans and so forth. Are the Democrats now entitled to describe the Republicans as a party of murderers and child abusers? I don't think so. It's a logical fallacy, a reverse syllogism and also a really fetid thing to do.

I'm trying to remember anything like it: Democrats occasionally like to associate Republicans with Wall Street, on the theory that no one likes Wall Street, and when all those Nixonites were being sent to prison after Watergate, the Democrats used to put out posters with pictures of all the convicted ones on them.

I'm still stopped by Gingrich. He is talking about the Democratic platform that was both criticized and hailed in New York for being terribly moderate and inoffensive, isn't he? I guess we're supposed to accept Gingrich's version of the Democratic convention instead of what we actually saw.

Time magazine has a long thumb sucker this week about family values as though it were a real issue. Family values did not create the deficit: It was Ronald Reagan who cut taxes and spent $2 trillion on the military. Family values did not create the health insurance crisis that plagues this country. Family values are not responsible for the recession. Family values didn't engineer the savings and loan mess.