Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics (19 page)

It mattered little that Panama is a tiny country with a tiny military. What mattered was the
display of strength
that, in American political culture, comes from war, no matter how senseless the war, no matter how weak the enemy. And indeed, President Bush’s top aides did not emphasize any supposed benefit to American national security from having invaded Panama, but instead celebrated the idea that President Bush showed the world who is boss:

Even though the Panamanian leader was not immediately captured, kept control of his radio station, could remain at large for months and may have left behind mini-Noriegas with disruptive capacities of their own, he appears to have little capacity now to exercise real power.

“We have cut off the head of that government,” said Gen. Colin L. Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Yesterday’s ‘maximum leader’ is today’s hunted fugitive,” said Secretary of State James A. Baker 3d. Most experts agreed with their assessments….

Last spring, Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., General Powell’s predecessor, told a Congressional committee that using military force in a place like Panama could be “a messy, messy business.” In the fall, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney said that direct military intervention would seriously damage United States relations with the other countries of Latin America. Both proved right.

And only last night, Mr. Nixon told a group of senators on Capitol Hill that General Noriega was the sort of man who should be left to fall of his own weight….

The Latin American reaction, even from those nations that have led the way in branding General Noriega an outlaw, was furious. Mexico, for example, said that “fighting international crimes is no excuse for intervention in a sovereign nation.” Memories of gunboat diplomacy—a phrase used often today in world capitals—run deep….

Unprepared to scale down the objective—getting rid of General Noriega—Mr. Bush finally decided to scale up the means he would authorize.

Here we find what have become the depressingly familiar constants in virtually every discussion of American war in our mainstream political discourse—the willingness, even eagerness, to wage war against countries that do not and cannot attack us; reflexive support for any war efforts from America’s highly technocratic “foreign policy experts” and the underlying belief that American invasions of other countries are always justifiable because as a country that is inherently good, our invasions and bombs are well-intentioned. Missing entirely from Apple’s front-page article were any contrary views from war opponents, any argument that the United States has no right to invade other nations at will, remove their leaders, and then occupy their country.

But far more significant than all of these now-common elements in our discussions of war is the psychological and cultural premise, the way in which wars are equated with strength and toughness. By “cut[ting] off the head of that government” (as Colin Powell put it) and turning its president into a “hunted fugitive” (as James Baker put it), the United States could feel powerful and strong. We showed them—and the world—who was dominant.

As a result, George Bush 41 proved his manhood by invading Panama. Based on this one decision to go to war, the front page of the
New York Times
declared him “capable of bold action.” He and his aides “show[ed] the world promptly that they carried big sticks.” Bush fulfilled the “Presidential initiation rite” by demonstrating his “willingness to shed blood.” Thus, declared Apple, Bush had overcome the perceptions of “timidity” and invisibility by “showing his steel”—all by sitting in the White House and starting a war with a small and weak country.

But as incoherent as this premise is, it is plainly the overriding cultural theme of American politics—that “real men” are leaders who start and prosecute wars. Within this twisted right-wing/media cultural framework, there is no need ever to fight in an actual war or undertake any acts of real courage. That is why combat veterans George H. W. Bush and John Kerry are suspected of being wimps and cowards, while combat avoiders such as Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Rudy Giuliani are deemed tough and courageous.

As Stephen Ducat noted in
The Wimp Factor,
the day after Bush 41 ordered the invasion of Panama, the Associated Press published an article based on the assertions from a “face-reading expert,” Laura Rosetree, that trumpeted the manliness of Bush’s physical attributes. The headline: “Bush’s Chin Proves He’s a Macho Guy, Face ‘Reader’ Says.” As usual, “macho” was presented as the antithesis of the empathetic “bleeding heart” liberal man:

“He doesn’t say whatever he’s really feeling or thinking,” she said. “If you literally read his lips, they are proclaiming, ‘I’m not ever going to get sentimental on you. I’m not going to be a bleeding heart.’”…

Her conclusion: Bush is a hard-nosed pragmatist and skeptic, a die-hard ideologue, a shrewd negotiator and skilled conciliator, an intellectual who revels in the realm of ideas, a decision-maker who respects facts, disdains feelings and isn’t afraid of criticism….

To set the record straight, she says, Bush is a macho man—it’s right there in the semicircular knob on his prominent, square-jawed chin.

“That semicircle relates to being very proud of his masculinity, the macho aspect, forcefulness, and being very sensitive to appearing weak in front of other people,” she said.

“The wimp image in the presidential campaign must have bothered him excruciatingly,” she added.

“His straight chin shows that he makes his major life decisions based on principles and ideology, not on compassion or other people’s feelings. This is not the chin of a Santa Claus, it’s the chin of a crusader.”

The
Time
magazine cover for the issue marking the invasion of Panama and the capture of Noriega depicted bulging biceps covered in the Stars and Stripes.

With a single decision to send the U.S. Marines to invade a small, weak country, Bush 41 transformed himself from effete weakling into macho War President. Adopting the John Wayne template, American leaders—and particularly right-wing political figures—have long been proving their steely manhood via boisterous war cheerleading.

No political leader has ever benefited more from this perverse equation of sending others off to war and personal toughness than his son, George W. Bush. From the moment Bush began exploiting the 9/11 attacks for political gain, his followers—including, as always, our establishment press—depicted this coddled combat-avoider as some sort of MacArthur or Patton.

This deceit found perhaps its most obscene expression in a 2003 Fox News interview conducted by Sean Hannity of Gen. Tommy Franks, who back then was widely hailed as a war-hero genius, but who today is widely blamed for the failures of the early stages of America’s occupation of Iraq. After he retired from active duty, General Franks ran around defending the administration’s handling of the Iraq War, all the while insisting that he was nonpartisan and had no allegiance to the Republican Party. But in mid-2004, as the presidential campaign was swinging into full force, Franks released a new book. In conjunction with his book tour, he announced that he was endorsing George W. Bush’s reelection.

Franks chose to promote his book, and endorse Bush, on Fox News, in an exclusive interview granted to Hannity during the Republican National Convention. Hannity began the interview by announcing that Franks had the “No. 1
New York Times
bestseller. It’s called
American Soldier.
Congratulations,” and then informed his viewers that Franks had decided to announce his endorsement for the presidential election. The following dialogue ensued:

FRANKS:
All right. You know, I think about some of the great quotations of history and a lot of them have to do with choice. And the fact of the matter is that there are periods in American history when it’s—when it’s really important to make a choice.

And that’s why Cathy and I are here. That’s what this is about. We’ve made a choice.

HANNITY:
And that choice is?

FRANKS:
George W. Bush.

HANNITY:
You are here to support the president.

FRANKS:
Absolutely. I’ve seen—I’ve seen this president when it was—when it was dark outside, when the times were hard.

What we’ve wrestled with is trying to think our way through, how close are we to the end of this threat, to our nation from terrorism? And I’ve—I’ve convinced myself that we’re—that we’re in this for the long haul. This is not going to be over tomorrow.

And so I thought about things like consistency. I thought about things like persistency. I thought about unswerving, unwavering character. And the longer I thought, and the more Cathy and I talked about it, the more convinced we became that we had to speak up.

HANNITY: You almost sound to me like a guy that’s been at war—been in a war with him, like hand in hand. And really, that’s really what you have been, in a bunker together, battling…

FRANKS:
Many, many—sometimes early and sometimes late and sometimes with great frequency. And I—I don’t think we have had a period, Sean, in American history, not in my lifetime, when the stakes were as high as they have been.

By that point in the Iraq War, 982 actual American soldiers—people who had, in reality, rather than in Sean Hannity’s fantasy, been “in a bunker together, battling”—had been killed in combat in Iraq, and another 8,000 had been wounded. But Bush’s followers equated his sending them to fight with Bush himself being a warrior, with his actually being in a “bunker.”

The Hannity/Franks interview provides a superb example of the unceasing success of the John Wayne deceit as the central fuel of the Republican Party. In the right-wing world, when it comes to proving one’s masculine credentials, cheerleading for a war is not just the equivalent of, but is superior to, actually fighting in one.

But if Hannity/Franks’s depiction of Bush as being in a “bunker” was the most obscene example of this twisted equation, perhaps the most explicit was the truly unbelievable discussion that took place on the MSNBC show
Hardball
on the day in May 2003, when Bush flamboyantly dressed up in a fighter pilot costume, landed on an aircraft carrier, and delivered his now-infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech. Establishment media stars and pundits—conservatives and liberals alike—marched forward to pay homage to the triumph and conquest of our great masculine warrior-leader, George W. Bush.

As Bush pranced around in his costume, Matthews literally sounded like a sixth-grade schoolgirl with a crush, hailing Bush as a Real Man, the type of masculine leader America craves—in contrast to the soft and effete Democratic presidents of the past:

We’re proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a little swagger, who’s physical,
who’s not a complicated guy like Clinton or even like Dukakis or Mondale, all those guys, McGovern. They want a guy who’s president.

Women like a guy who’s president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president.
It’s simple. We’re not like the Brits. We don’t want an indoor prime minister type, or the Danes or the Dutch or the Italians, or a Putin. Can you imagine Putin getting elected here?
We want a guy as president.

And it wasn’t just Matthews. As they showed footage of Bush giving his Iraq War victory speech, Matthews was joined in his effusive, drooling praise of Bush’s manhood by right-wing pundit Ann Coulter and Democratic pollster Pat Caddell, as they continuously yammered about Bush as some sort of super-male, conquering Roman emperor:

MATTHEWS:
What’s the importance of the President’s
amazing display of leadership tonight?

[…]

MATTHEWS:
What do you make of the actual visual that people will see on TV and probably, as you know, as well as I, will remember a lot longer than words spoken tonight?
And that’s the President looking very much like a jet, you know, a high-flying jet star. A guy who is a jet pilot. Has been in the past when he was younger, obviously.
What does that image mean to the American people, a guy who can actually get into a supersonic plane and actually fly in an unpressurized cabin like an actual jet pilot?

[…]

MATTHEWS:
Do you think this role, and I want to talk politically […], the President deserves everything he’s doing tonight in terms of his leadership.
He won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics.
Do you think he is defining the office of the presidency, at least for this time, as basically that of commander in chief? That […] if you’re going to run against him, you’d better be ready to take [that] away from him.

[…]

MATTHEWS:
Let me ask you, Bob Dornan, you were a congressman all those years.
Here’s a president who’s really nonverbal. He’s like Eisenhower. He looks great in a military uniform. He looks great in that cowboy costume he wears when he goes west. I remember him standing at that fence with Colin Powell. Was [that] the best picture in the 2000 campaign?

[…]

MATTHEWS:
Ann Coulter, you’re the first to speak tonight on the buzz.
The President’s performance tonight, redolent of the best of Reagan—what do you think?

COULTER: It’s stunning. It’s amazing. I think it’s huge. I mean, he’s landing on a boat at 150 miles per hour. It’s tremendous. It’s hard to imagine any Democrat being able to do that. And it doesn’t matter if Democrats try to ridicule it. It’s stunning, and it speaks for itself.

MATTHEWS:
Pat Caddell, the President’s performance tonight on television, his arrival on ship?

CADDELL:
Well, first of all, Chris, the—I think that—you know, I was—when I first heard about it, I was kind of annoyed. It sounded like the kind of PR stunt that Bill Clinton would pull. But then I saw it. And you know, there’s a real—there’s a real affection between him and the troops.

[…]

MATTHEWS: The President there—look at this guy! We’re watching him. He looks like he flew the plane. He only flew it as a passenger, but he’s flown—

CADDELL: He looks like a fighter pilot.

MATTHEWS: He looks for real. What is it about the commander in chief role, the hat that he does wear, that makes him—I mean, he seems like—he didn’t fight in a war, but he looks like he does.

CADDELL:
Yes. It’s a—I don’t know. You know, it’s an internal thing. I don’t know if you can put it into words. […] You can see it with him and the troops, the ease with which he talks to them. I was amazed by that, frankly, because as I said, I was originally appalled, particularly when I heard he was going in an F-18. But—on there—but the—but you know, that was—

MATTHEWS: Look at this guy!

CADDELL:
—was hard not to be moved by their reaction to him and his reaction to them and—

MATTHEWS:
You know, Ann—

CADDELL:
—you know, they—
it’s a quality. It’s an innate quality. It’s a real quality.

MATTHEWS: I know. I think you’re right.