Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics (16 page)

While the civilized world has recoiled in horror at the excesses and war-hungriness of the United States over the last six years, the only real complaint from our right-wing war cheerleaders about the Commander-in-Chief is that he has not given them enough torture, secret prisons, wars of aggression, barbaric slaughter, and liberty infringement. Their hunger for those things is literally insatiable, because they need fresh pretexts for feeling strong. And nothing provides those feelings of strength better than revering a tough-guy male leader and mocking liberal males as weaklings and losers.

The True Meaning of Chicken Hawks

The central reason Republicans so relentlessly parade around as tough guys with warrior virtues is that their leaders are invariably the precise opposite. The playacting masks the sad reality. Just as drag queens must use wildly exaggerated female costumes, makeup, and gestures to mask their masculinity, right-wing leaders must use increasingly flamboyant warrior disguises—and an increasingly war-hungry agenda—to obscure what really lurks behind those disguises.

Indeed, the second most astonishing political scam of the last six years—behind only the permanently jaw-dropping fact that 69 percent of Americans believed as late as September 2003 that Saddam Hussein personally participated in the planning of the 9/11 attacks—is that the 2004 presidential candidate who fought in actual combat in Vietnam was the one depicted as the weak, subversive coward. By contrast, the candidate who used powerful family connections to avoid fighting was depicted as the brave, masculine fighter-warrior who had the backbone to stand down the Evil Enemies and protect us all.

That is why so many right-wing hypocrites who have never been anywhere near the military—and will never go near it even as their wars are burdened by a lack of volunteers—have a monomaniacal obsession with military glory. They revel in constant rhetorical displays of how resolute and courageous they are, with notions of forced submission and humiliation of their opponents (just take notice of how central a role those concepts play in neoconservative arguments), and with depicting those who oppose war as cowards (even when the cowards in question, such as Jack Murtha, are decorated Marines with thirty years of service).

The term “chicken hawk” (in the context of war) is much used, debated, and discussed, but its true, most revealing meaning is rarely made explicit. Although there is no formal definition for it, the chicken-hawk criticism is
not
applicable to someone who merely (a) advocates a war and also (b) will not fight in that war and/or has never fought in any war. After all, the vast majority of Americans in both political parties meet
that
definition. The war in Afghanistan was supported by roughly 90 percent of Americans, as was the first Persian Gulf War, even though only a tiny fraction of war supporters actually fought in them.

Something more than mere support for a war without fighting in it is required to earn the chicken-hawk label. Chicken-hawkism is the belief that advocating a war from afar is a sign of personal courage and strength, and that opposing a war from afar is a sign of personal cowardice and weakness. A “chicken hawk” is someone who not only advocates a war but believes that that advocacy is proof of the same courage required of those who will actually engage in combat.

One of the nation’s most consummate chicken hawks is, unsurprisingly, one of the loudest advocates of sending others off to fight in endless wars:
The Weekly Standard
editor, Fox News contributor, and
New York Times
columnist Bill Kristol. Kristol’s central political view is that those who advocate sending other Americans off to fight in more and more Middle Eastern wars are themselves strong, resolute, principled, and brave. But those who oppose sending others off to fight in those wars are weak, cowardly, spineless appeasers.

As but one example, Kristol, writing in the June 2006
Weekly Standard,
urged U.S. intervention in the Israeli war against Hezbollah, claiming that those who want the United States to enter that war are “strong horses” and those who oppose it are “weak horses.” Thus, said Kristol, individuals such as E. J. Dionne, Richard Cohen, and George Will are all “weak horses” because they wrote columns arguing against increased U.S. involvement in Middle Eastern wars. By contrast, Kristol is a “strong horse” because he wrote a magazine column advocating that war.

As is true of most right-wing war cheerleaders who dominate today’s Republican Party, Kristol believes that his desire for other people to fight more wars in the Middle East makes him not only wise (which is arguable) but also strong and brave (which it inarguably does not). He assigns to himself the courage and strength of those who will actually fight in a war, simply because he sits in his office, protected and safe, and advocates for war.

One of the most illustrative specimens of the chicken-hawk strain is Norman Podhoretz—the leading right-wing warmonger, “Godfather of Neoconservatism,” top foreign-policy guru to Rudy Giuliani, and loudest advocate of starting a new war with Iran. In a mid-2007 article in the
Wall Street Journal,
Podhoretz urged George Bush to bomb Iran, saying that he “hopes and
prays every day
” for such an attack. Thereafter, he released a book titled
World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism,
which, as
Publishers Weekly
put it, argues that “we are in the middle of the fourth world war” and “attempts to steel us for the years of conflict to come.” Its purpose, said
Booklist,
is to argue for still more “regime change, preemptive war, and propagation of democracies in the Middle East.”

Podhoretz’s entire career has been devoted to urging the United States to wage wars against one Muslim country after the next. And as is true of so many combat-avoiding right-wing pundits, war cheerleading (from a safe distance) is a family affair for the Podhoretzes. His son, John, zealously supports current and additional wars in
National Review, Commentary,
and the
New York Post,
and Norman’s wife, Midge Decter, has long been one of neoconservatism’s most admired pro-war theorists. None of the Podhoretzes ever serve in the military, of course. None ever risk their lives for the wars they cheer on. They only demand that other families’ sons and daughters be sent off to the Middle East to fight and die in the new wars for which they constantly agitate, while they—the Podhoretzes—prance around as Churchillian warriors.

In understanding the right-wing chicken hawks’ perverse desire for war, one of the most revealing articles ever written is a 1963 essay in
Commentary
magazine by Podhoretz, titled “My Negro Problem—and Ours.” In it, Podhoretz argues that “I am convinced that we white Americans are…so twisted and sick in our feelings about Negroes that I despair of the present push toward integration.” But it isn’t the smarmy racism that is so appalling—such open expressions of pure racism were common in 1963 and Podhoretz would undoubtedly claim that he has left such sentiments behind. Rather, what is most significant is Podhoretz’s description of his psychology and view of himself that illuminates so much of the vicarious warrior culture that dominates our political system today (emphasis in original):

To me, at the age of twelve, it seemed very clear that Negroes were better off than Jews—indeed, than
all
whites…. [I]n my world it was the whites, the Italians and Jews, who feared the Negroes, not the other way around. The Negroes were tougher than we were, more ruthless, and on the whole were better athletes…. I was still afraid of Negroes. And I still hated them with all my heart….

The orphanage across the street is torn down, a city housing project begins to rise in its place, and on the marvelous vacant lot next to the old orphanage they are building a playground…. A week later, some of us are swatting flies on the playground’s inadequate little ball field. A gang of Negro kids, pretty much our own age, enter from the other side and order us out of the park. We refuse, proudly and indignantly, with superb masculine fervor. There is a fight, they win, and we retreat, half whimpering, half with bravado. My first nauseating experience of cowardice….

Gradually we abandon the place and use the streets instead. The streets are safer, though we do not admit this to ourselves. We are not, after all, sissies—the most dreaded epithet of an American boyhood….

That day in school the teacher had asked a surly Negro boy named Quentin a question he was unable to answer. As usual I had waved my arm eagerly…and, the right answer bursting from my lips, I was held up lovingly by the teacher as an example to the class. I had seen Quentin’s face—a very dark, very cruel, very Oriental-looking face—harden, and there had been enough threat in his eyes to make me run all the way home for fear that he might catch me outside….

For me as a child the life lived on the other side of the playground and down the block on Ralph Avenue seemed the very embodiment of the values of the street—free, independent, reckless, brave, masculine, erotic….

The hatred I still feel for Negroes is the hardest of all the old feelings to face or admit, and it is the most hidden and the most overlarded by the conscious attitudes into which I have succeeded in willing myself. It no longer has, as for me it once did, any cause or justification (except, perhaps, that I am constantly being denied my right to an honest expression of the things I earned the right as a child to feel). How, then, do I know that this hatred has never entirely disappeared? I know it from the insane rage that can stir in me at the thought of Negro anti-Semitism; I know it from the disgusting prurience that can stir in me at the sight of a mixed couple; and I know it from the violence that can stir in me whenever I encounter that special brand of paranoid touchiness to which many Negroes are prone….

There were plenty of bad boys among the whites—this was, after all, a neighborhood with a long tradition of crime as a career open to aspiring talents—but the Negroes were
really
bad, bad in a way that beckoned to one, and made one feel inadequate.

There will never be enough bombings to erase those feelings of weakness and inadequacy. But Podhoretz and his bloodthirsty right-wing followers—including his combat-avoiding protégées such as Rudy Giuliani and George W. Bush—will never stop trying. Demanding an attack on Iran was but the latest—hardly the last—war they crave in order to demonstrate their manliness. To see how true this is, one need only review this amazing passage that appeared in
Time
magazine back in July 2004, in an article titled “What to Do About Iran”:

But just as Tehran is divided over how to deal with Washington, so is Washington split over how to deal with Tehran. The
neo-conservative ideologues in the Bush administration have never made any secret of their desire to see the U.S. military pursue “regime change” in Tehran next. “Real men go to Tehran” was one of their playful slogans
during the buildup to Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The passage contains two critical insights into how our country has functioned over the last seven years. Right-wing warriors think they become “real men” by sending others into new wars (with Iran as the ultimate prize), while our leading media organs consider such twisted militarism to be “playful.”

Revealingly, among the country’s most influential neoconservatives, beyond just the war-cheerleading Podhoretzes, one finds extremely pervasive nepotism. A conspicuously high percentage of war-loving tough guys have had their careers created, shaped, and fueled by their parents. They have been dependent on the accomplishments of their parents, especially their fathers, whose political views they regurgitate almost without deviation. Just consider the intertwined neoconservative axis that spawned the two leading Iraq “surge” advocates, Bill Kristol and Fred Kagan.

Bill Kristol’s parents are Irving Kristol, the so-called Godfather of Neoconservatism (along with Podhoretz) and Gertrude Himmelfarb, whose defining political stance was paying homage to the virtues of Victorian morality at the American Enterprise Institute, the neoconservative “think tank.” Bill followed in his parents’ footsteps almost completely—the same career, a common political circle, and political beliefs nearly indistinguishable from those of his mother and father. And Bill’s career was shaped by his parents from the outset.

Fred Kagan followed the same life map as Bill Kristol, scrupulously tracking the career and mind-set of his father. Just as with Kristol
père,
the
Washington Post
labeled Kagan’s dad, Donald, “a beloved father figure of the ascendant neoconservative movement.” Fred Kagan even went so far as to coauthor a 2000 book with his father titled
While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion, Military Weakness and the Threat to Peace Today,
a book that—pre-9/11—advocated many of the same militaristic policies that today they justify by the 9/11 attacks.

Fred Kagan’s brother, Robert, is forged in the same mold. Along with Bill Kristol, Robert cofounded the Project for the New American Century, which, among other things, spent the years prior to the 9/11 attacks urging regime change in Iraq. Fred’s wife, Kimberly Kagan, now regularly authors paeans in the
Weekly Standard
and the
Wall Street Journal
to her husband’s glorious “surge” plan, and claims it is leading America to Victory in the War.

This sprawling nepotistic web weaves on and on even as one descends to the lower neoconservative ranks. The career of right-wing, pro-war Jonah Goldberg—
National Review
editor and
Los Angeles Times
columnist—was created and shaped by his mother, Lucianne, whose political beliefs he mirrors. Jonah came to national prominence by attaching himself to his mother as she milked her role in the Lewinsky scandal (during that time, Jonah, twenty-nine, was “vice president” of his mom’s company). Via his mother’s hard work exploiting their joint dirtmongering in that scandal, Jonah became a
National Review
editor—as recorded by this superb and darkly amusing 1998
Salon
profile, titled “The Jester of Monicagate: How Lucianne Goldberg’s Son Jonah Has Turned His 15 Minutes of Fame into a Full-Time Job”: