Manliness: WaPo Disapproves

The Washington Post has a short tut-tut piece concerning a book by a "conservative Harvard professor," which is a species even rarer than a manly man inside the Beltway.

I have a new theory about what's behind everything that's wrong with the Bush administration: manliness.

says the, guess-what, female scribbler of the piece, which goes on to attempt to let the air out of the tires [get the Freudian angle?] of decisive, self-confident governance.

"Brokeback Mountain" represents the edge of the wedge that seeks to feminize popular culture by emasculating manliness. The Zeitgeist is rife with parallel examples, as up to date as today's headlines from Paris, where symbolic manliness has disappeared. Les Journaux are screeching that Villepin must surely retract his legislation on liberalized labor practices because one of the demonstrators yesterday somehow ended up in a coma [no one saw what happened, but the screaming left asserts "it must have been.......Villepin's CRS goons."

In Germany, it took a female Kanzler to reassert manliness, just as Thatcher famously did for the chronically wobbly "read my lips...." Poppy. GWB just doesn't want to be out-testoseroned by a female, as his Poppy was.

France has mommified itself back into the womb, if last summer's plebiscite and recent {eleven, including casinos] areas of "national economic security" are any indication.

The WaPo writer goes haywire, indicating her absolute indifference to a wartime situation:

But the manliness of the Bush White House has a darker side that has proved more curse than advantage. The prime example is the war in Iraq: the administration's assertion of the right to engage in preemptive and unilateral war; the resolute avoidance of debate about the "slam-dunk" intelligence on weapons of mass destruction; the determined lack of introspection or self-doubt about the course of the war; and the swaggering dismissal of dissenting views as the carping of those not on the team.

The dark side of pre-emption may be dark, but it is twilight compared to the nightmare that civil-liberties fetishists on the left would have us live through. The judicial tyranny of ultra-left judges is an indication of the ultimate nanny-state. Better manliness than what the writer calls:

the Clinton White House often [operating] like Mansfield's vision of an estrogen-fueled kaffeeklatsch: indecisive and undisciplined. (Okay, there were some unfortunate, testosterone-filled moments, too.) Bill Clinton's would-be successor, Al Gore, was mocked for enlisting Naomi Wolf to help him emerge as an alpha male; after that, French-speaking John Kerry had to give up windsurfing and don hunting gear to prove he was a real man.

Sounds like both Al Gore and John Kerry eventually realized that too much estrogen and public hand-wringing demonstrates a political problem.