If Jack Ryan's divorce is fair game, so is John Kerry's

Consider this. If only actress and "Star Trek: Voyager" alum Jeri Ryan had been into getting jiggy with her husband in sex clubs, three distinct groups of people would be very happy. First, obviously, there would be Mr. Ryan himself. Not only would he not have been forced to quit his bid for Illinois senator, he would have gotten to, well, you know with Jeri Ryan in a really funky setting - which, however tacky that might be to us, is what he wanted from the get-go.

Second, the Kerry campaign would be ecstatic because he wouldn't be facing incredible pressure to open up his own divorce records. And, last, a vast horde of Star Trek geeks would have a new mental image to cuddle up to while playing with their action figures.

By now you probably know what I'm talking about. A guy named Jack Ryan was running for the Senate. The Chicago Tribune convinced a judge to open the Ryans' sealed divorce records, which revealed that Mr. Ryan liked to take the former Mrs. Ryan - who played a sort of intergalactic East German sex kitten on "Star Trek: Voyager" - to sex clubs in an effort to convince her to lower her shields and dock in public. Things would have been so much easier if they just used the holodeck! The sexless scandal with his own wife forced Ryan from the race.

Anyway, now the Chicago Tribune is caught in a tractor beam of its own design. OK, OK, I'll stop with the Trek references.

By forcing the Ryans' dirty laundry into the public view - against the wishes of both - the newspaper has set a powerful precedent in an election year. If such documents are fair game for Republican senatorial candidates, surely there's no logical reason to respect the privacy of Democratic presidential candidates in similar circumstances. Indeed, since the stakes are so much higher, presumably the obligation is all the greater.

John Kerry rightly says his divorce is nobody's business. But the Tribune and a sympathetic judge disagreed with that argument when the Ryans made it. "They were aware they were in a public court system, and protection from embarrassment cannot be a basis for keeping from the public what's put in public courts," Judge Robert Schnider ruled.

The Tribune is not yet demanding that Kerry's records be made public, although other news organizations are making noises to that effect. Personally, I think the Tribune has to follow through and make similar demands now for Kerry's records - or at least to explain why the Ryans were different. I don't think they can. (Full disclosure: This column is syndicated by a subsidiary of the Tribune Corp.)

That doesn't mean a judge would have to grant the request. Precedents are important in law, but they are not everything. Consistently doing wrong is not better than inconsistently doing right.

There's enough hypocrisy on all sides for everyone to call a truce. The press launched much of this feeding frenzy in the 1980s when they went after Gary Hart - who, in fairness, literally dared the press to prove he was fooling around on the side. Liberals threw fuel on the fire with their outrageous assaults on the privacy of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas and their giddy prying into Sen. Bob Packwood's diaries. Conservatives returned the favor by investigating Bill Clinton and becoming overnight converts to the moral authority of politically correct sexual-harassment laws.

I think Bill Clinton had it coming for reasons too tiresome and familiar to rehash here. But the fact is, if you disagree with me about Clinton, that's all the more reason you should agree with me about Ryan - and Kerry. Jack Ryan sounds like a pig to me (and to my wife!). But the charge against him was that he asked his wife to have sex with him and she declined. Explain to me the public's "right to know" that.

Now I wouldn't want to end this without making an important distinction. Barring very good cause, John Kerry's divorce records should be out of bounds. But, John Kerry's financial records - including those of his current wife - are fair game, and the press should be demanding their release. Kerry's wife, Teresa, is a liberal activist and, in effect, helped fund Kerry's campaign. She's the head of a huge foundation and probably a billionaire.

The finances of spouses have been legitimate territory for Republicans and Democrats alike for a long time, and it should be unacceptable for Kerry to invoke his legitimate right to privacy in order to withhold information the public has the right to know. Maybe the Chicago Tribune

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I would be very careful about demanding the opening of these records too loudly. I'm sensing a "politics of low expectations" game being played by the Kerry camp here, as in, we're all anticipating something of a Jack Ryan-type magnitude, and Kerry ends up looking like a picked-on, innocent choir-boy compared to the expectations that have been created.

I think that we should use the same principles in the political arena that we do in court - leave the individual's character and personal life out of things unless and until they decide to use their character or personal life to their benefit. At that point, character goes in and all the skeletons come marching forth from the closet. If a candidate chooses to run soley on his past record (prior office voting) and his principles, then I don't think it's fair to drag his kids' problems, or his divorces and such into it. As soon as he opens the door, telling everyone what a great guy he is, and what a family person he is, then I think anything which goes to the contrary becomes fair game.

If you want to get to the question of hypocracy let's take it directly to the media. The media themselves admit that Republicans are being held to a higher standard than Democrats on morality issues. The media claims this is "fair" because the Republicans take stands on moral issues, Democrats do not.

Ok, for the sake of argument let's grant the media's position. What matters in news coverage of a particular issue is not so much the stand but whether or not the party involved is being hypocritical.

If this is the media's position then I want a full court press (no pun intended) on the Kerry's tax records. A fundamental issue with the Democrats is that the rich don't pay their "fair share" of taxes. Now you know and I know and even the press knows that the reason Teresa will not release her tax records is because she has a billion dollars and she does not pay tax accordingly. She and her hubby are classic examples of how the super-rich avoid paying their "fair share" of the tax burden. I can think of no more hypocritical stand than the demagogery of rich liberals like the Kerrys when they wail that the rest of us are not paying enough taxes.

Don't expect the press to pick up on this. Because in the final analysis the biggest hypocrits of all are the members of the press themselves. They have to a man become whores of the Democrat party. The are no longer the watch dogs of our freedoms. They have reduced themselves to being nothing more than the propoganda arm of the Democrat party and everybody knows it ... but them.

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