Washington media elite pillow talk

On one of Thursday's nights cable "news" channel shows with lots of yelling, some interesting insights into the mind of Republican party operative, Sheri Annis, aka Mrs Howard (Washington Post "media critic") Kurtz:

ANNIS: ...He called himself, if you‘ll notice, a gay American, hyphenated status......
[yelling from Chris Matthews]...
"Gay American" evokes a minority status, and he‘s trying to play off of that. He wants to deflect any attention from the fact that he may have hired someone extremely irresponsibly who was not qualified at all because of a personal relationship. That doesn't look as good. It doesn't evoke as much sympathy as someone who happens to have finally found his identity and suddenly decided he's gay.

OK, so we're not going to be defending Governor McGreevey, who does indeed have a few questions to answer about how his Israeli sailor boyfriend became NJ's Director of Homeland Security and then wound up suing him, but the dripping cynicism of the above says a lot. In particular, McGreevey didn't hyphenate anything -- "And so my truth is that I am a gay American," but Sheri clearly has this grab-bag category of "hyphenated Americans" into which gay people get tossed.

And McGreevey didn't suddenly decide he's gay, he suddenly decided that now might be a good time to tell people about it, but to a political operative, when being gay is not a hyphen, it's just that day's choice of what mode to be in. A suggested topic for CNN's Reliable Sources -- who's more cynical, politicians or the hacks who cover them?

UPDATE: Reader CS points us to a blog discussing Kurtz's own recent contribution to the gay rights debate.