Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics (23 page)

The crux of Barnett’s homage is expressed as follows:

In the 1960s, history called the Baby Boomers. They didn’t answer the phone.

Confronted with a generation-defining conflict, the cold war, the Boomers—those, at any rate, who came to be emblematic of their generation—took the opposite path from their parents during World War II. Sadly, the excesses of Woodstock became the face of the Boomers’ response to their moment of challenge. War protests where agitated youths derided American soldiers as baby-killers added no luster to their image.

Few of the leading lights of that generation joined the military. Most calculated how they could avoid military service,
and their attitude rippled through the rest of the century. In the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, military service didn’t occur to most young people as an option, let alone a duty.

But now, once again, history is calling. Fortunately, the present generation appears more reminiscent of their grandparents than their parents.

Within these four paragraphs, one finds myths laid on top of more myths. To begin with, while Barnett contrasts two significant groups of the Vietnam era—those who bravely volunteered for combat and/or who were drafted ( Jim Webb and John McCain and Chuck Hagel and John Kerry) and those who protested the war—he revealingly whitewashes from history the other major group, the most ignoble one, the one that happens to include virtually all of the individuals who lead Barnett’s political movement: namely, those who claimed to support the war but did everything possible to evade military service.

Most revealingly, Barnett condemns those who refused to fight because
they opposed the war and chose instead to work against it,
but ignores completely those who
favored the war but sent others to fight and die in it.
Barnett has to ignore this group. He has no choice. He cannot possibly criticize such individuals, because this group includes the editors and writers of the magazine in which he is writing and virtually the entire leadership of the political movement that he follows.

Back in 2005, the political blogger Digby wrote a seminal post that comprehensively described all three “baby boomer” groups of the Vietnam era—including the one Barnett understandably wants to delete from history—as follows:

We are dealing with a group of right wing glory seekers who chose long ago to eschew putting themselves on the line in favor of tough talk and empty posturing—the Vietnam chickenhawks and their recently hatched offspring of the new Global War On Terrorism. These are men (mostly) driven by the desire to prove their manhood but who refuse to actually test their physical courage. Neither are they able to prove their virility as they are held hostage by prudish theocrats and their own shortcomings. So they adopt the pose of warrior but never actually place themselves under fire. This is a psychologically difficult position to uphold.

The [Vietnam] war provided two very distinct tribal pathways to manhood. One was to join “the revolution” which included the perk of having equally revolutionary women at their sides, freely joining in sexual as well as political adventure as part of the broader cultural revolution.

(The 60’s leftist got laid. A lot.) And he was also deeply engaged in the major issue of his age, the war in Vietnam, in a way that was not, at the time, seen as cowardly, but rather quite threatening. His masculine image encompassed both sides of the male archetypal coin—he was both virile and heroic.

The other pathway to prove your manhood was to test your physical courage in battle. There was an actual bloody fight going on in Vietnam, after all. Plenty of young men volunteered and plenty more were drafted. And despite the fact that it may be illogical on some level to say that if you support a war you must fight it, certainly if your self-image is that of a warrior, tradition requires that you put yourself in the line of fire to prove your courage if the opportunity presents itself. You simply cannot be a warrior if you are not willing to fight…. Men who went to Vietnam and faced their fears of killing and dying, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, put themselves to this test.

And then there were the chickenhawks. They were neither part of the revolution nor did they take the obvious step of volunteering to fight the war they supported. Indeed, due to the draft, they allowed others to fight and die in their place despite the fact that they believed heartily that the best response to communism was to aggressively fight it “over there” so we wouldn’t have to fight it here.

These were empty boys, unwilling to put themselves on the line at the moment of truth, yet they held the masculine virtues as the highest form of human experience and have portrayed themselves ever since as tough, uncompromising manly men while portraying liberals as weak and effeminate.

In this regard, the “9/11 Generation” is no different from its predecessor. One group is composed of an extremely small percentage of young Americans who volunteer to fight in combat. Contrary to Barnett’s attempt to hold them up as the symbolic prop of the “9/11 Generation,” they actually represent—as noted in the first chapter—a tiny percentage of Americans in this age group. A far larger percentage of Americans actually fought in the Vietnam War than fought in the “9/11 era.”

Then there is the much larger percentage of young Americans who vigorously oppose the 9/11-era warmongering. And finally there is the tragically sizable portion—much larger than was true of the hated “baby boomer” generation—characterized by that most contemptible attribute: vocal war-cheerleading and a self-image of resolute strength combined with a refusal to fight,
even though the war missions they cheer on are suffering due to a lack of volunteers.

Contrary to the military heroism with which Barnett tries to cloak his political movement, it is this lowliest group—the “empty boys,” the war cheerleaders who send others to fight in their wars—that leads the country’s right wing and has led the country for the last seven militarized years; which publishes
The Weekly Standard
and edits
National Review
and broadcasts the most popular right-wing talk-radio shows and Fox News programs; and that has been responsible for the series of liberty-abridging policies implemented, the wars the United States has fought, and the new ones it threatens to fight, ever since the 9/11 attacks. The political movement of which Barnett is a part and off which
The Weekly Standard
feeds is led by the very group of Vietnam-era baby boomers who failed “to answer the phone.”

It is no surprise, then, that the younger generation of the political movement led by the Vietnam-era chicken hawks largely emulates their cowardly and principle-free behavior. The defining attribute of the
Weekly Standard
strain of the “9/11 Generation”—led by Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich and Sean Hannity and Dick Cheney and George W. Bush—is the unprecedented ease with which one can cheer on endless wars without having to make even the most minimal sacrifices to sustain them.
That
is the unique and defining attribute of the Republican Party strain of the 9/11 Generation.

Toughness isn’t measured by how willing one is to order the U.S. military—the most powerful in the world—to start wars. Strength isn’t a function of how willing someone is to torture or otherwise abuse helpless detainees in captivity. And manliness certainly isn’t demonstrated by being as bellicose and antagonistic as possible when doing so entails absolutely no risk.

Quite the contrary, swaggering faux-masculinity, mindless militarism, and an excessive fear-driven willingness to use force are unmistakable signs of profound weakness, almost always leading to worthless devastation. As Albert Camus said of the widespread willingness to send others off to die, “Mistaken ideas always end in bloodshed, but in every case it is someone else’s blood. That is why some of our thinkers feel free to say just about anything.”

Imagine someone who lies in bed at night, clutching a rifle, and leaping out of bed upon hearing every noise, guns blazing, petrified that there is an intruder after them. Such an image conjures real weakness, even hysteria—not strength, and certainly not traditional masculine warrior virtues. That is even truer of the person who lies in bed and dispatches someone else to do the shooting upon hearing every noise. One can debate whether that behavior is prudent or wise. But what it plainly is not is tough and strong.

While the Great American Hypocrites on the Right now prioritize their tough-guy costumes and warrior playacting, this is far from the only deceitful role they play. This process of prancing around, pretending to be the opposite of what they actually are, is what they do. It is who they are, particularly when it comes to winning elections.

Just as was true of their pioneer, John Wayne, playacting as a warrior while running away from war is not enough. Piled onto their pretenses of toughness are a whole array of other disguises, all of them designed to mask the ugly reality of what they are. Principal among these—as examined in the following chapter—are their endless efforts to masquerade as wholesome and moral family men.

That’s how twice-and thrice-divorced and draft-avoiding individuals like Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh become media symbols of the Christian values voters and tough-on-defense stalwarts. And it’s how a lifelong Beltway lobbyist and lawyer like Thompson, who avoided Vietnam, standing next to his twenty-five-years-younger second wife, was held up by our media as a good Baptist, a Regular Guy symbol of piety, and a no-nonsense, tough-guy, super-masculine warrior who will protect us all. It’s what enables the serial adulterer with the incomparably wrecked family life, tough-guy Rudy Giuliani, to proclaim with a straight face that he opposes same-sex marriage because he believes that it is vital to preserve the “sanctity of marriage.”

To perpetuate that sham, the same pattern repeats itself time and again. Just as our right-wing tough guys exploit advocacy of endless wars to mask their lack of actual courage and strength, so, too, do they exploit their purported belief in “traditional morality” to obscure the fact that their lives are bereft of such morality. But because their mindless, vapid media allies eagerly swallow and digest all of these manipulative images, Americans are continuously presented with personality images of these right-wing political leaders that are the very opposite of reality.

CHAPTER FOUR

Wholesome Family Men

S
ERIAL
D
IVORCES,
T
HIRD
W
IVES,
G
AY
P
ROSTITUTES,
D
RUG
A
DDICTIONS, AND
M
ISTRESSES

T
he Republican Party has become so dependent on pretending that its leaders are morally superior, wholesome family men that they have invented numerous slogans designed to stake a claim to this moral high ground: The Moral Majority. Family Values. The Values Voter. Traditional Marriage. Yet time and again, the politicians parading around under these moralistic banners have lived their lives in complete contradiction of them. Just as they do with tough-guy war-cheerleading, the country’s right-wing leaders, in order to deceive the American voter, have cynically dressed up in moralistic costumes to hide what Great American Hypocrites they actually are.

Throughout the 1990s, America’s right wing and our nation’s media stars were driven mad by an endless obsession with moralizing about every detail of the sex life of Bill Clinton, including—literally—explicit discussions on our television news programs and in our nation’s newspapers about whether the President’s penis was marked by unique spots. That bizarre obsession plummeted to previously unthinkable depths when the GOP-led Congress actually impeached the twice-elected, highly popular President of the United States who had presided over national prosperity and relative peace.

Since then, sexual moralism has taken center stage along with mindless militarism in the electoral strategy of the right wing of the Republican Party. But the leaders whom this party puts forth as the Beacons of traditional morality are the very living and breathing embodiments of that which they claim to condemn. In their actual lives, right-wing leaders personify the sexual sleaze and amoral hedonism against which they endlessly sermonize. Sexual morality and traditional marriages are campaign props that they trot out to disguise themselves and win elections. But those props disappear completely when it is time for them to live their actual lives.

Indeed, throughout 2006 and 2007, evidence continued to emerge that “Family Values” and “Traditional Marriage”—particularly for those who had crusaded for Bill Clinton’s impeachment in the late 1990s—were nothing but manipulative lip service. The evidence has now piled up sky high demonstrating that the very moral crusaders leading the witch hunt against Bill Clinton were living the most decadent private lives imaginable. Indeed, huge numbers of their key leaders during the impeachment spectacle were themselves engaged—not once or twice but
chronically—
in behavior that was equal to, and often far more extreme than, that which led them to exploit the President’s sex life as an election issue and make condemnations of his private life their most compulsive pastime.

Former GOP House Speaker and Christian Conservative Newt Gingrich has a long history of adultery in Washington, beginning in the 1970s while he was married to his first wife. As
Salon
’s Stephen Talbot reported in 1998, Gingrich “has admitted sexual indiscretions during his first marriage.” As Talbot put it, Gingrich demanded a divorce from his first wife “in her hospital room where she was recovering from uterine cancer surgery,” and then,