I think that our friend Mandos at politblogo is trying to help me to see the lighter side of vile and hateful sexist jerkery (no, I won't say piggery: I admire pigs), and I'll admit that his latest clever title gave me a wonderful Saturday morning pure laugh: "Iraq: contaminated by girl cooties."
The absurd infantility of paranoid if powerful neo-con men who will blame anyone, absolutely anybody else, for the messes they have deposited themselves but refuse to take adult responsibility for is perfectly caught in that title. "Eww! Girls! The White House is full of them! Ewww! That's why we're losing the war! It's not my fault!"
Mandos was sending us to this so-called article on the Vanity Fair website. I see the point of wading through flaccid American liberal excuses for serious journalism for one reason only: they have better access to the raw material than most of us do, and we need the raw material. Richard Perle and Michael Ledeen are not about to grant me an interview, but they will talk to some lazy hack from Vanity Fair who at least knows how to transcribe, so I suppose we must be grateful for small mercies.
And the cheap transcriptions turn out to be, after all, good enough. These guys -- the neo-con ideologues who bullied and harangued their own people and much of the Western world into murderous "pre-emptive" wars, who now recognize how totally their fantasies of international domination have failed -- convict themselves with every self-pitying word they utter.
The self-pitying excuse that caught Mandos's eye this morning was this quote from Michael Ledeen:
"Ask yourself who the most powerful people in the White House are. They are women who are in love with the president: Laura [Bush], Condi, Harriet Miers, and Karen Hughes."
But of course, eh? Laura did it! So says Michael Ledeen, major boy-candidate for at least a couple of fraud charges and maybe something approaching war-crimes charges before the International Criminal Court. Oh, oops. Excuse me. Scratch that. The Bush administration doesn't recognize the ICC. Gosh. I wonder why.
The Middle East and Central Asia may be in flames and daily in danger of worse, at least partly because of a slimy creep best known for believing that
"Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business,"
But the women did it! According to Michael Ledeen, it all fell apart because president-überman fell victim to those softie women, and if you can figure out how softie women managed to victimize the übermen who run this world, men like George W. Bush and Michael Ledeen, then you are a better man than I am, which wouldn't be hard, of course, since I am not a man at all.
Aren't we glad, though, that no one in Canada ever tries that sort of slime-bag diversion from serious political issues? That all our male politicians and pundits are above cheap gambits like blaming the girls whenever the übermen soil their own pants?
Excuse me. I have guests. Michael, this is Norman. Norman, Michael.
So, I guess the neo-con version of the proverb goes like this:
"Victory has a hundred fathers; women breed defeat."
Me, I was most interested in our Frumness' comments in that VFair pre-hibernatorial prep piece (ie. the neocons appear to be getting ready to crawl into a well insulated cave until the next abominable opportunity at world domination arises).
But why should we care about Frummy's dissin' of the Shrubbery?
Well, I can't help but wonder if his final burning of the bridge that crosses the moat of crocodile tears into Bushville means that Mr. Frum is planning to come back to the GWNorth for the duration.
And if he were to do so, how might he occupy himself during the hibernatory period?
_____
(read all about it at my place if interested).
.
Gosh, Stephen: That's Count Ciano you're doing a play on there, isn't it? That gives me a chill, although it's horribly appropriate. Ledeen is supposed to be something of a student of Italian fascism, yes? Got a bit carried away with his studies and ended up an enthusiast maybe?
RossK, we could do a lot more with all those thugs, I agree. I've been on a feminist tear lately and Ledeen seems to me such a [self-censored], so I just let fly at him, but there is so much world-class snivelling going on in all those quotes (even if the article itself is puny).
Thanks for the extra giggles about Frum. I've given you one more over at your place.
Yo skdadl:
I have never understood the preoccupation with David Frum. So he is a Canadian - this gives him little in my books. Canadians are just like
the rest of the world .. some good, some bad; most inbetween somewhere. Such is life in bell curve. J. K. Galbraith commented that countries are: "convenient economic units" and that seems appropriate here.
I recall reading that he did not even come up with that singular phrase "Axis of Evil" - he thought up something similar - and that was edited into the "A of E". (Not a bad phrase in a melodramatic kind of way. M.L. King did better with "I have a dream."- but then MLK was a better
speaker than Bush.)
He (Frum) has become another of the ideologues that cannot countenance that their pet theories of governing have turned out to be beyond the
pale in utility and unacceptable to the American public. Another phrase jumps into my mind here, one concerning rats and sinking ships.
They cannot accept they made an error in theory, so SOMEONE must have screwed up. Your essay on the "cooties" in the White House just documents another of these stretchs, these searches for some one to blame. The idea, that America is always correct (almost by definition) is sacred -the rub lies in the execution.
Harry Chapin, in a ballad about a dance band on the sinking Titanic, sings of a Preacher that goes to the lifeboat deck and, seeing the
confusion, straightens things out by helpfully yelling: "Women and children and Preachers first."
Perhaps the naughtical intimations of "stay the course" are deeper than I suspected.
croghan27
Gosh, Stephen: That's Count Ciano you're doing a play on there, isn't it? That gives me a chill, although it's horribly appropriate. Ledeen is supposed to be something of a student of Italian fascism, yes? Got a bit carried away with his studies and ended up an enthusiast maybe?
That's right, skdadl.
My intention was to capture the mix of blame-shifting and antifeminism in the words of the incompetent woman-blamers.
Even more disturbing, if possible, than these neo-cons' remarks have been the recent writings of one Mark Steyn, whose book _American Alone_ is excerpted in today's National Post:
But in the space of two generations, a bunch of tough hombres were transformed into a thoroughly feminized culture that prioritizes the secondary impulses of society — rights and entitlements from cradle to grave — over all the primary ones.
For Steyn, the Monty Python 'Lumberjack Sketch,' well captures the degenerate effeminization of our once-manly culture:
In that, Canada’s not alone. If the O’Sullivan thesis is flawed, it’s only because the Lumberjack Song could also stand as the postwar history of almost the entire developed world. To understand why the West seems so weak in the face of a laughably primitive enemy, it’s necessary to examine the wholesale transformation undergone by almost every advanced nation since World War Two. Today, in your typical election campaign, the political platforms of at least one party in the United States and pretty much every party in the rest of the West are all but exclusively about those secondary impulses: government health care, government day care, government paternity leave. We’ve elevated the secondary impulses over the primary ones: national defense, self-reliance and reproductive activity. If you don’t “go forth and multiply” you can’t afford all those secondary-impulse programs whose costs are multiplying a lot faster than you are. Most of the secondary-impulse stuff falls under the broad category of self-gratification issues: We want the state to take our elderly relatives off our hands not because it’s better for them but because otherwise the old coots would cut into our own time. Fair enough. But once you decide you can do without grandparents, it’s not a stretch to decide you can do without grandchildren.
If your stomach is strong enough, you can read it here, or perhaps this longer excerpt from Macleans.
A 'Battle for Births,' a privileging of a certain kind of masculinity, a deep suspicion of pleasure, even civilization, because of their 'softening' effects: if we haven't seen this movie before, we've seen ones like it.
For my sins, Stephen, I will go to read the rest of that, but ... It is so hard to believe that this is happening again, don't you think? I keep trying to think that the primal (need a better word than that, but can't think of it at the moment) impulses towards revenge and mastery can be conquered by reason, have been in some cultures, and yet here they are again, surfacing in the supposed heirs of the Enlightenment.
Years ago, before 9/11, I used to read Steyn for fun. I thought of him as not so different from Eric Margolis, for instance -- a major error, I now realize, but in those days that was a possible confusion. I've always been ready to take smart conservatives seriously, and I would sometimes think that Steyn was one of those. Remember the melodramatic crisis over Elian Gonzalez in 1999-2000? The little boy from Cuba whose fanatic relatives in Florida tried to prevent his reunion with his father? Steyn wrote a column about the fanatic relatives that was a classic, I thought, very funny and yet very principled. In those days, he was capable of that.
Now it appears that he has become a mouthpiece for slavering warlords: let's steal their women and rape their cows. I mean, it would be absurd if it weren't so believably threatening.
Women are starting to worry, Stephen. They really are. None of us thought that people with any kind of public credibility at all would ever regress this far. And I recognize that the attack on uppity women is only a symptom of something more generally threatening.
"those secondary impulses: government health care, government day care, government paternity leave. We’ve elevated the secondary impulses over the primary ones: national defense, self-reliance and reproductive activity."
Hey, real men don't need health care, and all that day care and paternity leave just discourages them from gettin' on with their reproductive activity. Real men don't do paternity, they just reproduce and leave the little woman to raise the kids, have given birth in the kitchen while making supper (no need for health care), while they go out and wave their spears at the other guys.
This is really easy to satirize. Are there any published columnists who can do that nowadays, or do we rely on the TV satirists?
Here's Amanda Marcotte on a recent interview with Mark Steyn on this very subject:
http://pandagon.net/2006/11/16/welcoming-the-end-of-the-racist-patriarchy/