Last modified: Thursday, September 4, 2008 11:59 AM PDT The Country Curmudgeon: More liberals unmasked By Roy Hicks Well, well ... a couple more high-profile liberals have been unmasked as the skunks they are. John Edwards, the multimillionaire ambulance chaser and 2004 vice presidential candidate, was finally exposed as a philanderer while his wife was battling what might have been terminal cancer. Even my liberal colleague on this page commented sourly on that, and rightly so. This is not to say there haven’t been indiscretions on both sides of the political aisle, such as those of former congressman Newt Gingrich under very similar circumstances and the restroom shenanigans of U.S. Sen. Larry Craig. Not to mention indiscretions by former Republican congressmen John Tower, Henry Hyde, Dan Crane, J.C. Watts and perhaps some others. Presently, we have the case of Bernie Ward: a flaming San Francisco liberal talk-show host who likes to be known as the “Lion of the Left.” While still in the San Francisco Bay area, I used to occasionally listen to this turkey’s radio show. I was appalled by the grating tenor voice of this defrocked Catholic priest spewing his venomous hatred of God, the church, conventional morality, rightful government, the police, the military and everything else that holds our society together. Now we learn Ward has been indicted for distributing the vilest kind of child pornography — vivid images of very young children being subjected to forcible sexual abuse — and is presently facing as much as nine years in prison. One can only wonder about the humiliation his wife and family are trying to deal with. Liberals like to pretend sexual abuses are “victimless crimes.” “Mutual consent!” they wail. Oh? Since when does a minor child have the right to “consent” to unlawful sex? In the case of Ward, the liberal chickens are finally coming home to roost. One can only hope when he gets to prison he will finally reap all the rewards of the “sexual liberation” he has so long espoused. Put more bluntly, most hardcore cons do not like phony priests or people who abuse children. I’ll try to look sad, but the brutal truth is it’s refreshing to see one of these liberal scoundrels finally get what’s coming to him. Such embarrassing gaffes usually only enhance the credentials of liberals, while the scandals of anyone claiming to be a political conservative are almost always enough to run them out of office. Rightly so, I might add, but any degree of fairness must apply the same standards of accountability to both sides of the aisle, and anything less is sheer hypocrisy. What’s especially grating is how so many liberal skunks from the past have escaped serious scrutiny. The cases of Ted Kennedy (Chappaquiddick), Barney Frank (homosexual call-ring being run from his own apartment) and Jeremy Studds (accused of buggering underage pageboys) come immediately to mind. So does the shameful case of current San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsome endorsing homosexual marriage after being publicly found guilty of committing adultery with the wife of his best friend and political adviser. The classic case of such liberal mischief is Bill Clinton: guilty of adultery many times over, of moral turpitude and of perjury. Yet, to this day, that skunk wags his finger in our faces (“Ah never had sex with that woman!”) and continues to escape burial in the junkheap of history. Even more disgraceful is how Hillary has covered up for him for so long to further her own political ambitions. When are we going to rear up in righteous indignation and roar “Enough is enough!” of such disgusting immorality? Roy Hicks, a Payette resident, writes a weekly column for the Argus Observer. Comments or questions for Mr. Hicks can be directed to: Roy Hicks, Argus Observer Newsroom; 1160 S.W. Fourth St., Ontario, OR 97914