Subject: dick armey 's slip

so dave wharton , having determined that the delay between richard armey 's " barney fag " remark and its correction lasted less than a second , is confident that it must have been " a slip and not a slur " ( presumably blameless ) , all the more since armey has a ph . d . and a wealth of political savvy and " would not think it to his advantage to make such an utterance . " a victim , then , of linguists with ulterior agendas . how in the in the world is one to respond to such a statement ? if wharton had made the suggestion 75 years ago you might repeat the observation that freud offered in the introductory lectures to the effect that the merely somatic or phonetic concommitents of slips can't explain why they occur when they do - - as he put it , it 's like telling a policeman that the darkness of the night and the isolation of the street have caused your purse to be snatched . what might have possessed armey , then ? the new republic has pointed out that he was one of only forty-seven members ( gingrich was not among them ) who voted against george bush 's hate crime statistics act , which allowed the government to record violence against homosexuals ; that he voted to exclude people with aids from the americans with disabilities act ; that he voted to deny government funds to groups that boycotted the boy scouts of america on the grounds of that organization 's anti-gay policies ; and that he refused to sign a voluntary statement saying that his own office did n't discriminate against homosexuals . of course the remark was n't " intentional , " but the evidence is pretty thick that armey harbors just the sorts of inner demons who would have been lying in wait for any breach in conscious attention . most inhabitants of the late 20th century will acknowlege some acquaintance with pesky creatures like these , and you would think that it would be only by an act of willful repression that someone could deny their existence entirely . but maybe we should give wharton the benefit of the doubt ; maybe his is a genuine victorian innocence . only , just think of it ! all those theorists arguing that we are living the twilight of modernist era , when there are still people ( with an " edu " in their address , yet ) on whom it has not even begun to dawn .
