THE RECENT REVELATION that the first Log Cabin Republican was almost certainly Abraham Lincoln, he of an actual log-cabin childhood, has so far excited surprisingly little hysteria among the right-wing moralistas. Even noted National Reviewer Richard Brookhiser, examining in the New York Times the proof in question of Abe's same-sex interests – C.A. Tripp's posthumously published book, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln (Free Press, $27) – conceded as much. Tripp goes too far, of course, speculating with fin de siècle abandon about such matters as the Great Emancipator's youthful autoerotic habits and often writing with a sloppiness and imprecision he doubtless would have cleaned up if he had lived, but the core of the case is strong enough to survive these blemishes – and, in an odd way, is even strengthened by them. In the end, the undisputed facts that Lincoln as a young man shared a bed for four years with another young man (the handsome Joshua Speed) and as president often slept with a member of his military guard, David Derickson – but only when Mrs. Lincoln was away – are unscratched by, and transcend, Tripp's uneven discussions of them.

Lincoln gay? I wonder. Homosexual possibly, homoerotic almost certainly, homophilic beyond doubt – but gay is not so much a matter of sexual practice as of self-awareness and self-acceptance. Although Lincoln does not appear in Tripp's pages to be conflicted about his tastes, he was married and a father – as his contemporary Walt Whitman, say, was not. Whitman's sensibility, the sexual frankness of much of his poetry, strikes us even today as distinctly modern, and gay, while Lincoln's keeping up of appearances is what many of us would regard as an antiquated practice, relic of a lost world – excepting, of course, in the morally convoluted realm of Lincoln's putative political descendants, today's Republicans, where the variance between image and reality is pressurized by bad faith and ambition into a propulsive and often enraged hypocrisy.

I have always felt a certain sympathy for the Log Cabin Republicans of our time, who are at least honest about who they are and about the hopelessly skewed imperatives they are trying to unskew. We could hardly say the same thing about such sinister clowns as James Guckert, the homo hustler who infiltrated the White House press corps as "Jeff Gannon," ace reporter and lobber of softball questions before being outed – or Bill Bennett, who in recent years divided much of his time between television moralizing and gambling away his preachy-book millions at slot machines before being outed, or the great El Rushbo, who in recent years divided much of his time between radio moralizing and popping illegally acquired pills before running afoul of the law.

It hardly seems to be stretching a point to suggest that most of the Republican virtue patrol would considerably benefit from psychotherapy or strong antipsychotic medication (legally prescribed!), or maybe both. But of course that will not happen, for these bizarre people and the Republican political apparatus of which they are a part have made a foul but useful discovery: that projection – the spraying of distasteful and unmanageable aspects of one's character, such as cowardice and greed, onto some unsuspecting sap and then putting said sap in the pillory for being cowardly and greedy – is politically effective.

It helps, of course, that the Democrats are remarkably sappy, standing there like oafs with yesteryear's playbook and its exhortations to fair dealing and accurate vote-counting while being spattered with demented Republican vomitus: You are not patriotic, you love the terrorists and/or the French, bin Laden wants you to be president. It helps too that the electorate has descended into a haze of stupefaction and dread, the valley of the shadow of denial, in which the screamingly obvious dissociativeness and dishonesty of Republican propaganda are somehow not screamingly obvious. Or perhaps the Republican genius is one of agency, of relaying the public's own worst qualities – the greed and self-righteousness, the fear of being exposed as debtors or bullies or of being attacked again by strange men in turbans whose oil we need like crackheads need crack – to the doltish Democrats, who become It while the real villains flee laughing into the night.

Republican silence on the question of Lincoln's queerness is not surprising. It is a hypocritical silence – this is a party, after all, that seeks to amend the Constitution to ensure the second-class status of nonhetero people – but these are hypocrites who wear their hypocrisy with an undeniable élan. And Lincoln is useful to them in their ravening quest for power, full-spectrum dominance in domestic politics, one-party rule. For Lincoln is surely the father of the America we live in, the rich, mechanized continental state, and Lincoln did, however tortuously, free the slaves. He stands for the proposition that America can be both great and good, and while today's Republicans are neither, they hope that by hovering in Abe's shadow we won't notice. So far they're right.