The Weenie Boys of the Right

What Weenie Boys Do. New York Times political writer Adam Nagourney owns up (via Glenn Greenwald) to being the conduit by which the Bush administration made public its characterization of John Edwards as a "Breck Girl" in 2004. Nagourney flails himself for not insisting that "anonymous" Bush officials allow their names to be used for the story. He also mentions that other Democratic candidates were starting to focus on Edwards' looks as a campaign issue.

But Nagourney completely ignores is the extent to which the Bush administration and the right in general devote their energy to developing clever personal put-downs of the Democrats, liberals, and Democratic proposals. It started with Lee Atwater's nicknaming of Michael Dukakis as the "shrimp" in the 2008 campaign and has continued onward through the sneering at John Kerry for being "French," the characterization of the Iraq Study Group as the Iraq Surrender Group, and labelling deadlines for withdrawal as "surrender deadlines." Ann Coulter is the acknowledged master of these kinds of put-downs and I've seen a lot of right-wing posters on Slate's Fray devote considerable energy to mastering put-down techniques.

As somebody who writes about Bush administration and Republican campaign strategies, Nagourney should have noticed that one of the key strategies of the Republicans is to "frame" their personal attacks on the Democrats by coming up with new nicknames.

The Dems Don't Get It. Glenn Greenwald is focused on the extent to which writers like Nagourney advance the Republican agenda through their uncritical reporting of these kinds of Republican talking points. That's certainly a real problem especially when the media becomes an endless conveyor for the GOP point of view in the way that CNN has for the Republican response to Harry Reid. What's been worse is that Democrats themselves have bought in to Republican characterizations of us as the party of the effete and disconnected for so long.

I'm particularly aggravated by this crap because I was a hard-hitting, cheap-shotting linebacker in football (ejected from two games), hard-fouling guard in basketball (fouled out of six games in one year), and big-throwing shotputter (at 49', 8") during my high school years. I've never given the Republican memes about the Democrats as "soft," "illogical," focused on "feelings" the time of day. And I've never heard anything indicating that union guys or African-Americans acknowledge these insults either. But it's been clear for years that many white liberals, especially white media types, secretly agree with right-wing put-downs of themselves and envy the right-wing mastery of the put-down idiom. That's where the phrase "self-hating liberal" comes from. Reporters like Adam Nagourney are picking up on the self-perceptions of a significant part of their white liberal audience when they communicate right-wing put downs. Thus, Nagourney's white liberal audience will have to become more self-respecting and intolerant of the Republican language of abuse if anyone expects him to change his writing.

The Weenie Boy Way. What's particularly annoying about the white liberal acceptance of right-wing put downs is that liberals never consider the source. The Bush administration and the right-wing in general is full of guys who are physically inept (Bush), are afraid to come out of their rooms (Rush Limbaugh), sound like Tinker Bell (Alberto Gonzales), have the dough-faced look of someone who got picked on a lot in high school for being ugly (Karl Rove, Kyle Sampson, etc.), are so tiny they can barely be seen in a room of normal people (Scooter Libby), have no social skills (Douglas Feith), or belong to bizarre academic cults like Straussianism (Wolfowitz, Feith, William Kristol, etc., etc.). You have to wonder if any of these guys who didn't have a lot of money ever got a date in high school.

Personally, I have no objections to these kinds of qualities. Given that Mrs. RSI is 5' 2", I'm especially fond of the height-challenged and I hung out with musicians and grade grubbers as well as the jock clique. However, I'm going to follow the right-wing example and describe this whole group as "weenie boys" and want to emphasize that the "weenie boys" of the Bush administration and the right were often inept at all the sports and dating kinds of things associated with conventional masculinity. Rush Limbaugh is especially famous for spending most of his adolescence holed up in his room. Not exactly showing huge potential for masculinity there.

And they're still not very well-connected to conventional masculinity. Karl Rove was revolted when Sheryl Crowe touched him. I can tell you from the bottom of my guy heart that I wouldn't go "don't touch me" if Sheryl Crowe grabbed my arm. Likewise, George Bush is in love with Alberto Gonzales and Rush Limbaugh prefers his sex with a dose of viagra and Dominican prostitutes.

What the "weenie boys" of the right have done though is to perfect the hyper-masculine political gesture. Worshipping masculinity but locked off from conventional masculine achievement, all the weenie boys can do is work on talking tough.

People on the left should show them the contempt they deserve.