Headcase - Qui

George Bush must be at the end of his rope. It appears that his administration’s long record of deceiving the public has come to an end.
Despite several days of passing off politics as military strategy, Gen. David Petraeus failed to sway the public’s opinion about the Iraq war. Several polls reported that most Americans still think the invasion was a mistake and still want troops to come home as soon as possible.
Of course, this hasn’t really sunk into the brains of Washington pundits, who, as usual, carried on about the general’s professional, masculine demeanor. Ever since George Bush landed on an aircraft carrier in a flight suit and codpiece, declaiming the end of combat operations in Iraq, pundits have been focusing on the masculinity of politicians.
Chris Matthews of “Hardball” is particularly notorious. Viewing Bush’s landing on the aircraft carrier, he said this: “Here’s a president who’s really nonverbal. He’s like Eisenhower. He looks great in a military uniform. He looks great in that cowboy costume he wears when he goes West. ...
“We’re proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a little swagger, who’s physical, who’s not a complicated guy like [former President Bill] Clinton or even like [former Democratic presidential candidates Michael] Dukakis or [Walter] Mondale, all those guys, [George] McGovern. They want a guy who’s president. Women like a guy who’s president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president. It’s simple.”
Undeterred by the American public’s dislike of Bush, Matthews has continued to romance the hypermasculine. In June, he said this about Republican candidate Fred Thompson:
“Does [Fred Thompson] have sex appeal? I’m looking at this guy and I’m trying to find out the new order of things, and what works for women and what doesn’t. Does this guy have some sort of thing going for him that I should notice? ...
“Can you smell the English Leather on this guy, the Aqua Velva, the sort of mature man’s shaving cream, or whatever, you know, after he shaved? Do you smell that sort of – a little bit of cigar smoke? You know, whatever.”
The macho homoeroticizing of Republican candidates is requiring some major revisionism. Incredibly, Rudy Giuliani remains the Republican front-runner despite having lived with a gay couple, having had three wives and having children who won’t speak to him. He has dressed in drag, and his adultery is well-documented. You couldn’t fashion a lifestyle more reprehensible to the Republican base, but, apparently, his family-values sins are trumped by his swaggering on 9/11.
Meanwhile, candidates who do not please the punditry class are feminized. The best recent example is John Edwards, called “The Breck Girl” during the last presidential election. Ann Coulter called him a “faggot” a few months back, and pundits have been obsessed with a couple of expensive haircuts he had.
As Eric Alterman notes in his Oct. 1 column in the Nation, John Solomon of the Washington Post marveled that Edwards’ hair has received at least as much attention as his position on health care. Then Solomon penned 1,200 more words about the candidate’s grooming.
Alterman also observes that Barack Obama is being rapidly feminized by Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, who infamously wrote in 1999 that Al Gore was “so feminized ... he’s practically lactating.” She has heaped the usual code words on Obama: “testy,” “irritated,” “hung up,” “conflicted” and, my favorite, “self-consciously pristine.”
Glenn Greenwald, the must-read blogger at Salon.com, notes that it is appearance and rhetoric that make a difference to the Republican base – not reality. The best example is the recent flap over Sen. Larry Craig. While the Republican from Idaho was almost unilaterally condemned for playing footsie in a public restroom with an undercover cop, he didn’t actually engage in any sexual behavior. But Republicans demanded that he resign.
Meanwhile, David Vitter, the Republican senator from Louisiana, turned out to be regularly hiring prostitutes – but he got a pass from his colleagues. The hypocrisy in this game of “¿Quién es más macho?” is obvious. There’s a political reason, of course: Craig’s replacement will be named by a Republican governor, where Vitter’s would have been named by a Democrat. So politics also trumps moral consistency.
But the greater reality, which we learned during the Clinton impeachment, is that if Republicans start kicking heterosexual womanizers out of the party, its ranks would quickly empty. It would be bye-bye to nearly every Republican candidate for president.
Meanwhile, the punditry class, for reasons nobody can quite explain, continues its obsession with testosterone, proving that it is the press above all that lacks balls.
Cliff Bostock holds a Ph.D. in depth psychology. For information on his private practice, go to www.cliffbostock.com.