Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics (20 page)

The media’s hero worship of George Bush—his magical transformation from war avoider into conquering warrior by virtue of his ordering a small, weak country to be invaded—reached its utterly absurd apogee as Matthews and longtime right-wing tough guy G. Gordon Liddy explicitly admired what they fantasized was the size of George Bush’s genitalia:

MATTHEWS:
What do you make of this broadside against the USS
Abraham Lincoln
and its chief visitor last week?

LIDDY:
Well, I—in the first place, I think it’s envy. I mean, after all, Al Gore had to go get some woman to tell him how to be a man. And here comes George Bush. You know, he’s in his flight suit, he’s striding across the deck,
and he’s wearing his parachute harness, you know—and I’ve worn those because I parachute—and it makes the best of his manly characteristic.
You go run those—run that stuff again of him walking across there with the parachute.
He has just won every woman’s vote in the United States of America. You know, all those women who say size doesn’t count—they’re all liars. Check that out.
I hope the Democrats keep ratting on him and all of this stuff so that they keep showing that tape.

MATTHEWS:
You know, it’s funny. I shouldn’t talk about ratings. I don’t always pay attention to them, but last night was a riot because, at the very time [Congressman] Henry Waxman was on—and I do respect him on legislative issues—he was on blasting away, and these pictures were showing last night, and
everybody’s tuning in to see these pictures again.

George Bush had just delivered one of the most absurd speeches in American history—declaring victory in the Iraq War in May 2003 and the glorious “end to major combat operations.” The weapons of mass destruction that “justified” his invasion had not been found. Saddam Hussein had not been captured. The insurgency was growing, and no plan for stabilizing Iraq had been formulated. Yet the media was transfixed by Bush’s costume—his dressing up as a conquering warrior—and worshipfully transformed him into the epitome of masculine power and warrior courage, a modern-day Napoleon.

The reverent, besotted depictions of George W. Bush as a swaggering tough guy and warrior—all because he ordered the U.S. military to invade Iraq and then strutted around on an aircraft carrier in a fighter-pilot costume—were ubiquitous among our nation’s media stars.

On CNN, Wolf Blitzer excitedly announced “a little bit of history and a lot of drama today when President Bush became the first commander in chief to make a tailhook landing on an aircraft carrier,” noting that Bush was “a onetime Fighter Dog himself in the Air National Guard” and that “Bush is no stranger to military aircraft.” Brian Williams found Bush almost as attractive as Gordon Liddy did, proclaiming this on his CNBC show:

And two
immutable truths
about the President that the Democrats can’t change: He’s a youthful guy. He looked terrific and full of energy in a flight suit. He is a former pilot, so it’s not a foreign art farm—art form to him. Not all presidents could have pulled this scene off today.

Fox News’s John Scott “reported” that Bush’s aircraft landing “was like the Beatles climbed out of that plane, and that’s very much what it looked like from here.” David Sanger, in the
New York Times,
believed that a better comparison was Tom Cruise:

But within minutes Mr. Bush emerged for the kind of photographs that other politicians can only dream about.
He hopped out of the plane with a helmet tucked under his arm and walked across the flight deck with a swagger that seemed to suggest he had seen
Top Gun.
Clearly in his element, he was swarmed by cheering members of the
Lincoln
’s crew….

Never before has a president landed aboard a carrier at sea, much less taken the controls of the aircraft.
His decision to sleep aboard the ship this evening in the captain’s quarters conjured images of the presidency at sea not seen since Franklin D. Roosevelt used to sail to summit meetings.

That weekend, on CBS’s
Face the Nation,
host Bob Schieffer and
Time
’s Joe Klein could barely contain their giddiness and reverence for Bush’s stunt:

SCHIEFFER: As far as I’m concerned, that was one of the great pictures of all time.
And if you’re a political consultant, you can just see “campaign commercial” written all over the pictures of George Bush.

KLEIN: Well, that was probably the coolest presidential image since Bill Pullman played the jet fighter pilot in the movie
Independence Day.
That was the first thing that came to mind for me. And it just shows you how high a mountain these Democrats are going to have to climb.
You compare that image, which everybody across the world saw, with this debate last night where you have nine people on a stage and it doesn’t air until 11:30 at night, up against
Saturday Night Live,
and you see what a major, major struggle the Democrats are going to have to try and beat a popular incumbent president.

Brit Hume hailed Bush’s courage in undertaking this dangerous mission:

But this was risky business.
You know, there’s grease and oil on the decks of those aircraft carriers. The wind’s blowing. All kinds of stuff could have gone wrong. It didn’t, he carried it off. Somebody, perhaps he, obviously, believed he could. But this was no slam dunk.

On CNN’s
The Capital Gang,
then–
Time
columnist Margaret Carlson described it as “so well done…a pretty stirring tableau.” On CNN, Laura Ingraham cooed that “speaking as a woman…seeing President Bush get out of that plane, carrying his helmet…that was a very powerful moment.” She pronounced Bush a “real man.”

It was not only Bush who benefited from this cartoon equation of cheering for war and thereby becoming a “man.” The vast majority of the President’s most boisterous pro-war aides—the Doug Feiths and Dick Cheneys and Richard Perles and Paul Wolfowitzes and Elliott Abramses—prattle unceasingly about the need to show resolve, by which they mean support for one war after the next, notwithstanding the fact that they avoided military service and have spent their lives ensconced in think tanks and government jobs. Yet their ranks are virtually devoid of any individuals who have been to war or who served in the military. They specialize in sending other people’s sons and daughters to war while shamelessly posturing as brave, Churchillian warriors for freedom.

2008: The Same Script

With the combat-avoiding, war-loving team of Bush and Cheney about to leave the political scene, America’s right wing is transparently preparing to have their next leaders read from the same deceitful script. As the Republican Party sought in 2007 to find the successor to George W. Bush, our next “Commander-in-Chief,” its entire top tier of candidates and pundits was characterized by tough guys playacting.

More often than not, the GOP primary race resembled some sort of bizarre reality show, where the objective was not to put forth persuasive policy positions but to exude a caricatured version of über-masculinity. As Joe Conason put it in a
Salon
article in July 2007:

Nothing unites the Republican candidates for president or excites the conservative base more than their bellicose barking about war and confrontation. The GOP presidential debates often sound like a tough-man competition, with Rudolph Giuliani denouncing the “cut-and-run” Democrats, Mitt Romney demanding a double-size Guantánamo detention camp, and the rest of the pack struggling to keep pace with the snarling alpha dogs.

Yet while their rhetoric is invariably loud and aggressive, none of these martial orators has seen a day of military service—except for John McCain, whose prospects are rapidly deflating, and Duncan Hunter, whose campaign never got enough air for a single balloon. Unfortunately for those two decorated veterans, their party seems to prefer its hawks to be of the chicken variety.

From the beginning, Rudy Giuliani, the front-runner throughout most of the year, based his entire campaign on his alleged tough-guy status. As
Time
reported in mid-2007, in an article titled “Behind Giuliani’s Tough Talk,”

As Giuliani himself put it to the
Detroit News
recently, “The American people are not going to vote for a weakling. They’re going to elect someone who will protect them from terrorism for the next four years.” It’s the same calculus Bush used in 2004.

Right-wing pundits never failed to depict Giuliani as some sort of strong protector and warrior against all that is bad and threatening in the world. John Podhoretz, a Giuliani supporter, gushed: “The Republican Party is the party of strength at home and abroad, and for many, Rudy Giuliani personifies that.” His
National Review
colleague Ramesh Ponnuru added: “That [Giuliani] personifies strength ‘for many’ seems to me to be indisputable.” And our nation’s media stars often talked about Giuliani’s alleged “toughness” in terms so bizarre, even creepy, that it would make a pornography writer cringe. Here, for instance, was Chris Matthews with
Newsweek
’s Howard Fineman in mid-2007, oozing excitement over Giuliani’s paternal protectiveness:

FINEMAN:
I mean, “commanding Daddy” is not the phrase I would use because “Daddy” implies some generosity of spirit.

MATTHEWS:
Yes.

FINEMAN:
What’s appealing about Rudy Giuliani is not the generous side, what’s appealing about him is the tough-cop side.

MATTHEWS:
Right. You just wait until Daddy gets home.

FINEMAN:
Yes, that part…

MATTHEWS:
That Daddy.

FINEMAN:
…of the daddy. It’s the tough-cop side, so…

MATTHEWS:
Yes. Yes.

They are right in one sense. For the authoritarians comprising the Republican base and the faux-masculine-power-worshiping media pundits, what was appealing about Giuliani was that he conveyed “You just wait until Daddy gets home.” Craving a stern daddy as a political leader is the root of the authoritarian mind. Yet these are the warped images that dominate not only their psyches but their political “analysis” as well.

Giuliani himself incessantly milked the happenstance of his proximity to the 9/11 attack in New York by holding himself out as some kind of gladiator who had faced down Islamic terrorists in the arena. He incorporated into his stump speech a passage about terrorism and the Iraq War in which he says, “It is something I understand better than anyone else running for president.”

But from beginning to end, Giuliani’s self-touted image as a tough guy was pure myth. It had no more substance than did John Wayne’s role-playing as a war hero or George Bush’s playacting as a rancher and combat veteran in the bunker with Tommy Franks. When he had the opportunity to fight for his country in Vietnam, Rudy Giuliani hid from military service, engaging in one maneuver after the next to ensure that other, braver American men went off and fought and died in his place. What is “tough” or brave or courageous or resolute about any of that?

Revealingly, Giuliani staffed his campaign with foreign policy advisors who are exactly like him. He was surrounded by men who hold themselves out as brave warriors because they delight in sending other people off to fight one war after the next, yet who never displayed any acts of warrior courage in their lives, uniformly having avoided military service just like their candidate. From the start of his tough-guy campaign, Giuliani’s list of foreign policy advisors read like a directory of the nation’s most warmongering chicken-hawk neoconservatives—what the
New York Times,
with great understatement, described as “a particularly hawkish group of advisers and neoconservative thinkers”:

Mr. Giuliani’s team includes Norman Podhoretz, a prominent neoconservative who advocates bombing Iran “as soon as it is logistically possible” Daniel Pipes, the director of the Middle East Forum, who has called for profiling Muslims at airports and scrutinizing American Muslims in law enforcement, the military and the diplomatic corps; and Michael Rubin, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has written in favor of revoking the United States’ ban on assassination.

This sterling team of combat-avoiding warmongers also included former Bush aide David Frum, who coauthored a book with Richard Perle ambitiously advocating
An End to Evil
through a series of Middle East wars (to be fought by others). Giuliani’s team was notable not merely for their insatiable hunger for war but for their particular focus on waging Middle Eastern wars against various enemies of Israel. As
Harper
’s Ken Silverstein wrote:

There’s also Martin Kramer, who spent 25 years at Tel Aviv University and whose Middle East policy can basically be summarized as “What’s Good for Israel,” and former Senator Robert Kasten of Wisconsin, whose career was best known for his loopy attacks on the United Nations and for being arrested for drunk driving after running a red light and driving down the wrong side of the road.

I asked Augustus Richard Norton of Boston University, an expert adviser to the Iraq Study Group, for his take on Giuliani’s crew. He dubbed the group “AIPAC’s Dream Team.”

“What I find fascinating,” he said, “is how skewed this team seems to be in terms of the regional focus. Most of the members are well known as Israel advocates. There is no real expertise on Africa, Asia, Latin America, or much of Europe.”