1 Boring Old Man

Gentlemen First
The Vice President Gets the Vapors

By Ruth Marcus

Dick Cheney is worried that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has shrunken the "big sticks" of the once-tough guys who were the vice president’s colleagues in Congress.

Barbara Walters wants to know whether former president Clinton will organize the Easter egg hunt or fuss over Christmas decorations if there is a future President Clinton.

Tee hee hee.

There is a common subtext here, or, rather, common subtexts. The first is the continuing, maddening, mystifying discomfort with the notion of a woman as leader. The second involves the supposed implications — humiliating? emasculating? — of female leaders for the men around them.

In case you missed it, the vice president made those comments in an interview with the Politico. "Most striking were his virtually taunting remarks of two men he described as friends from his own days in the House: Democratic Reps. John Dingell (Mich.) and John P. Murtha (Pa.)," wrote my former Post colleagues Mike Allen, Jim VandeHei and John F. Harris.

Cheney, they wrote, "scoffed at the idea of two men who spent years accruing power showing so much deference to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in the big spending and energy debates of the year." The House’s senior Democrats "march to the tune of Nancy Pelosi to an extent I had not seen, frankly, with any previous speaker," Cheney said. "I’m trying to think how to say all of this in a gentlemanly fashion, but [in] the Congress I served in, that wouldn’t have happened."

Asked if these men had lost their spines, he responded, "They are not carrying the big sticks I would have expected."

Well, the mainstream Media has picked up Cheney’s Freudian attack on John Murtha and John Dingell [castration anxiety on parade…] – implying that they aren’t phallic enough. He might as well have said they’re a bunch of "wussies." Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post takes it lightly, with a feminist twist or two. Frankly, I think his comments are a bit more ominous than that. He knew what he was saying. Cheney is many things, but he’s not dumb. I think he’s winding up a campaign to reintroduce male chauvinism into the political discourse just as they’ve reintroduced racism [immigration issues being reduced to racist comments about Mexicans], torture [real men get tough in wartime], homophobia [the gay marriage issue], and now blatant sexism [the comments above about Hillary and Nancy]. So I think there’s a method to his madness – appealing to the "macho" vote and riding the backlash against the Civil Rights gains of the last part of the last century.

But there’s something more to be said about these comments – they’re mean as hell. He outed a C.I.A. Agent without blinking an eye. This bit of venom about "old friends" just rolled off of his tongue with a chuckle. Dick Cheney is a sarcastic, vicious guy, who hits "below the belt" [sticking with his thinly disguised gutter talk]. In spite of his hunting trips to fancy game preserves with a gagillion dollar gun or his picture fly-fishing [in the Washington Post series earlier this year], I hardly think of Dick Cheney as being a "manly" man. In fact, he’s one of those guys who gives men a bad name. He attacks from behind closed doors. He picks on women. He shoots old men. He was a major league draft dodger. He didn’t stand up for his lackey, Scooter Libby. He’s a war-monger who knows nothing of the military or war. And he’s a consumate "sneak" – stabbing others in the back without facing them directly. Truth be told, the whole lot of them swagger around talking "big man talk," but they’ve personally avoided any kind of "big man walk." Their "macho" lingo is as ingenuous as their "religious" pandering or their empty appeals to slogan-ized patriotism. This kind of pseudomasculinity is a virulent force in the world, and there’s nothing remotely funny about it. It’s a sickness – a defense against a profound underlying insecurity – and it drives the afflicted to do grossly irresponsible things…