Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics (15 page)

In November 2007, following a Democratic presidential debate, Dowd devoted an entire truly twisted column to depicting Hillary Clinton as an “icy,” vicious “dominatrix” and Barack Obama—“Obambi”—as her emasculated, intimidated, submissive slave. And she contrasted “Obambi” with Rudy Giuliani, who is far too masculine to be “kept in line” by Hillary’s whip:

The debate dominatrix knows how to rattle Obambi…. Mistress Hillary started disciplining her fellow senator last winter, after he began exploring a presidential bid…. She has continued to flick the whip in debates….

With so much at stake, she had to do it again in Vegas, this time using her voice, gaze and body language to such punishing effect that Obama looked as if he had been brought to heel….

Other guys, like Rudy, wouldn’t even be looking for a chance to greet Hillary, as Obama always does. Other guys, like Rudy, wouldn’t care if she iced them…. Obama may be responsive to Hillary’s moods because he lives with another strong woman who knows how to keep him in line. She is a control freak—that’s why her campaign tried to coach wonky Iowa voters to ask wonky questions—and her male rivals are letting her take control….

If Rudy’s the nominee, he will go with relish to all the vulnerable places in Hillary’s past…. Hillary has her work cut out for her. Rudy will not be so easy to spank.

This is the columnist occupying the most influential punditry space in the country—the Op-Ed page of the “liberal”
New York Times.
And like so many of her journalistic colleagues, she has for years written about our political culture with these same themes asserted over and over: Democratic males are weak, effeminate, girly. Democratic women are emasculating, freakish, “feral.” GOP males are true men. Ann Coulter can barely say it better herself.

Following her Edwards “faggot” speech, Coulter insisted that she did not intend the remark as an anti-gay slur—that she did not intend to suggest that John Edwards, husband and father, was gay—but instead used the word only as a “schoolyard taunt,” to call him a sissy. And that is true. Her aim was
not
to suggest that Edwards is actually gay, but simply to feminize him, as the Republican Party attempts to do with all male Democratic or liberal political leaders.

But for multiple reasons, nobody does that more effectively or audaciously than Coulter, which is why they need her so desperately and will never jettison her. There are few things that can match the efficacy of a thin white woman with long blond hair running around mocking the lack of masculinity of liberal males. She is the id of the right-wing faction that controls the Republican Party, the banshee that screams its most valuable rhetorical device. How could they possibly shun her for engaging in tactics on which their entire movement depends? They cannot, which is why they do not and will not.

Grand Masquerade Party

The converse to this whole process is equally vital. As critical as it is to right-wingers to feminize Democratic and liberal males (and to masculinize the women), it is equally important to create false images of masculine power and strength around their own authority figures. The reality of this masculine power is almost always nonexistent. The imagery is all that counts.

This functions exactly the same as the images of moral purity that they work so hard to manufacture, whereby the leaders they embrace—such as Gingrich, Limbaugh, Bill Bennett, even the divorced and estranged-from-his-children Ronald Reagan and Coulter herself (with her revolving door of boyfriends and broken engagements)—are plagued by the most morally depraved and reckless personal lives, yet still parade around as the heroes of the “Values Voters.” Just as what matters is that their leaders present themselves as moral (even while deviating as far as they want from those standards), what matters to them also is that their leaders
playact
as strong and masculine figures, even when there is no basis, no reality, to the playacting.

Like John Wayne, Ronald Reagan never got anywhere near war (claiming eyesight difficulties to avoid deployment in World War II), and he spent his life as a Hollywood actor, yet to this day, conservatives swoon over his masculine role-playing as though he was some sort of super-brave military hero. Meanwhile, Jimmy Carter, who served on real live nuclear submarines, as well as George McGovern (a combat veteran who volunteered to serve in World War II), are mocked as weak. As McGovern put it in a 2007
Los Angeles Times
editorial, responding to accusations from Dick Cheney equating “McGovernism” with cowardice and surrender:

In the war of my youth, World War II, I volunteered for military service at the age of 19 and flew 35 combat missions, winning the Distinguished Flying Cross as the pilot of a B-24 bomber. By contrast, in the war of his youth, the Vietnam War, Cheney got five deferments and has never seen a day of combat—a record matched by President Bush.

While Republicans have ensured that virtually every asset of America bears the name of Ronald Reagan—including a glorious battleship, the USS
Ronald Reagan—
right-wing tough guys who never spent a day in the military protested and mocked endlessly when it was announced, in 2005, that a submarine would be named after the Navy veteran Jimmy Carter. Carter is a graduate of the Naval Academy, having attended during World War II. In the Navy he became a submariner, serving in both the Atlantic and Pacific fleets, and he rose to the rank of lieutenant. He was personally selected by Admiral Hyman Rickover, known as “Father of the Nuclear Navy,” for the top-secret nuclear submarine program, where Carter enrolled in graduate work in reactor technology and nuclear physics, and served as senior officer of the precommissioning crew of the
Seawolf,
America’s second nuclear submarine.

Despite a history of military service that few right-wing warriors can come close to matching, conservatives heaped endless scorn and ridicule at the decision that a nuclear submarine would bear Carter’s name. At
National Review
alone—filled to the rim with absurd, swaggering, pretend tough guys—Steve Hayward referred to the “oxymoronic Jimmy Carter attack submarine” Jonah Goldberg published an e-mail spouting that “naming this boat for Carter resounds with irony” and another stating that “the USS
Jimmy Carter
will be *The Best* submarine in the Navy, precisely because of the jokes” and Goldberg himself wrote:

You do have to feel sorry for the crew of the USS
Jimmy Carter.
I’m sure they’ll be very well qualified and all that. But as several readers have noted, they’re just never going to hear the end of it.

Goldberg continued: “If a Russian sub attacks undefended ships, will the USS
Jimmy Carter
immediately boycott the U.S.-Russian softball game in Guam?” His colleague Kathryn Jean Lopez sneered: “I can’t get over how ridiculous the sound of a Jimmy Carter attack sub is. The enemy trembles.”

In the world of right-wing Republicans, actual bravery, courage, and military service are irrelevant. What matters is a willingness to
strike the pose
of a warrior.

The ultimate expression of faux, empty, masculine courage is, of course, the Commander-in-Chief himself, George W. Bush—the Glorious Leader whom John Podhoretz hailed in the title of his worshipful cult book
The First Great Leader of the 21st Century—
with the ranch hat and brush-clearing pants and flight-suit outfits that would make the Village People seethe with jealousy. Just behold this poster, which was in great demand at past CPAC events:

That laughable absurdity really reveals the heart of the Republican Party movement. They have transformed themselves into a cult of contrived hypermasculinity—whereby leaders and followers alike dress up as male archetypes such as cowboys, ranchers, tough guys, and, most of all, warriors—even though they are nothing of the kind.

Numerous commentators, such as former Nixon White House counsel John Dean and psychology professor Bob Altemeyer, have definitively and convincingly documented this dynamic. People who feel weak and vulnerable crave strong male leaders to protect them and to enable them to feel powerful. And those same people will throng to a political movement that gives them those sensations of power, strength, and triumph, and will devote absolute loyalty to any political leader who can provide them with that.

This is also the basic dynamic of garden-variety authoritarianism, and it is what the right-wing Republican Party has become at its core—far more than a set of political beliefs or geopolitical objectives or moral agendas. All of it—the obsessions with glorious “Victory” in an endless string of wars; vesting more and more power in an all-dominant centralized Leader; the forced submission of any country or leader who does not submit to the Leader’s Will; the unquestioning Manichaean certainties; the endless stigmatization of the whole array of Enemies as decadent, depraved, and weak; and most of all, the canonization of their male Leaders as Strong, Powerful, Brave, and Über-Masculine—it’s just base cultural tribalism geared toward making the followers feel powerful and falsely secure.

The Coulter/Hannity/Limbaugh–led right wing is basically the Abu Ghraib rituals finding full expression in an authoritarian political movement. There is a reason that individuals such as Rush Limbaugh were not bothered by that horror show, but actually took perverse delight in and were tickled by the sadism displayed there and other revelations of American torture, barbarism, and cruelty. It is because that is the full-blooded manifestation of the impulses underlying this movement—feelings of power and strength from the most depraved spectacles of force. As Limbaugh—by far the most popular and important conservative pundit in America—said of the disgusting revelations of Abu Ghraib:

I’m sorry, folks. I’m sorry. Somebody has to provide a little levity here. This is not as serious as everybody is making it out to be. My gosh, we’re all wringing our hands here….

I mean, it’s ridiculous. It’s outrageous what’s happening here, and it’s not—and it’s not because I’m out of touch; it’s because I am
in touch,
folks, that I can understand. This is a pure, media-generated story….

This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation, and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it, and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You [ever] heard of need to blow some steam off?

Limbaugh is a physically weak individual, wallowing in a life of depraved hedonism, who has never displayed a single act of physical courage. He avoided combat in Vietnam by claiming that an anal boil rendered him unfit for service (and, once he became famous as an über-warrior, said nothing when a Limbaugh biographer falsely claimed it was due to a football injury). Thus, he takes pleasure in observing acts of American cruelty and barbarism. He finds “levity” in it and cheers it on. It makes him feel powerful and strong, feelings he—understandably—is unable to obtain from his own life and actions. With pulsating power from having defended the Abu Ghraib conduct, Limbaugh addressed his pretend troops, masquerading as the general he fantasizes himself to be. From his website’s transcript of his monologue about Abu Ghraib (emphasis in original):

I don’t understand what we’re so worried about. These are the people that are trying to kill us. What do we care what is the most humiliating thing in the world for them?…

There’s only one thing to do here, folks, and that’s achieve
victory
over people who have targeted us for a loooong, long time, well over 15, 20 years. It’s the only way to deal with this, and that’s why obsessing about a single incident or two of so-called abuse in a prison is nothing more than a giant distraction and could end up being something that will really ties [
sic
] our hands and handcuffs us in what the
real
objective is here, which is the preservation of our way of life and our country….

[B]ut the world is joining in now trying to taint us as a nation, as a people, and as a culture by virtue of these pictures on the basis that we have humiliated these people. What is hijacking our own airplanes and flying them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon? How humiliating is it to blow up American civilians in a convoy and have their charred bodies dragged from the car and dragged through the streets? There seems to be no sensitivity, concern or outrage for any of this anywhere in the world. So pardon me if my patience is a little short.