The horrors really are your America, Mr Bush
ANDREW SULLIVAN
'This is not America." Those words were President George W Bush's
attempt to explain the horrors of Abu Ghraib prison on the Arabic-
language network Alhurra in 2004. He spoke the words as if they
were an empirical matter, but a cognitive dissonance could be
sensed through them.
If the men and women who tortured and abused and murdered at Abu
Ghraib did not represent America, what did they represent? They
wore the uniforms of the United States military. They were under the
command of the American military. In the grotesque, grinning
photographs they clearly seemed to believe that what they were
doing was routine and approved.
And we now know from the official record that Donald Rumsfeld, the
defence secretary, had personally authorised the use of unmuzzled
dogs to terrify detainees long before Abu Ghraib occurred, exactly as
we saw in those photos. Does the secretary of defence not represent
America?
Almost two years after the torture story broke Congress finally
roused itself and passed an amendment to a defence appropriations
bill by John McCain that forbade the use of any "cruel, inhuman and
degrading treatment" of detainees by any American official anywhere
in the world. It was passed by veto-proof margins and Bush signed it.
But he appended a "signing statement" insisting that, as
commander-in-chief, he retained the right to order torture if he saw fit.
And so on May 18 the nominee for CIA director, Michael Hayden,
was asked directly by Senator Dianne Feinstein whether he regarded
"waterboarding" as a legitimate interrogation technique. Hayden
replied: "Let me defer that to closed session, and I would be happy
to discuss it in some detail."
Huh? Why a closed session? Isn't the law crystal clear? Isn't
strapping a person to a board, tilting him so that his head is below
his feet, and pouring water through a cloth into his mouth to simulate
drowning a form of "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment? And
isn't that illegal? In America? Or is that not America either?
I ask these questions because so few in power in Washington want
to go there. When I have brought up the question of these atrocities
in front of senators and senior administration officials in private, I
have noticed something. Their eyes flicker down or away. Some
refuse to discuss the matter, as if it is too much to contemplate that
the US has become a country that detains people without trial or due
process, and reserves the right to torture them.
Or they tell me that however grotesque the charges Bush would
never approve of them. It's always someone else's responsibility.
"This is not who American servicemen are," Richard Armitage, the
then deputy secretary of state, insisted after Abu Ghraib. Or in the
words of the secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, in an interview
with Al Arabiya: "Americans do not do this to other people."
I know what these people are saying or trying to say. The vast
majority of American soldiers are decent, brave, honourable
professionals. The America I love and the Americans I know are
among the most admirable and open-hearted people on the planet.
But this much must also be said: the words of Bush and Rice and
Armitage are still untruths. That much we know. And last week, we
had to absorb another dark truth: that in a town called Haditha, US
Marines appear to have murdered women and children in cold blood
and covered it up.
There is also a new claim of a similar kind of massacre at a place
called Ishaqi. Last week the American military issued fresh ethical
guidelines for soldiers in Iraq. One marine commander told Time
magazine: "If 24 innocent civilians were killed by marines, this will
put a hole in the heart of every single marine."
I believe him. But I do not believe that this president has ever
acknowledged his own responsibility for the atrocities committed by
Americans on his watch and under his command. He simply cannot
process the fact that his own hand provided the signature that
allowed torture to spread like a cancer through the military and CIA.
He cannot acknowledge that his own war policy — of just enough
troops to lose — has created a war of attrition in Iraq in which
soldiers are often overwhelmed and demoralised and stretched to the
limit, and so more than usually vulnerable to the psychic snaps that
sometimes lead to atrocities.
His obdurate refusal to change course, to provide sufficient troops, to
fire his defence secretary, to embrace, rather than evade, the
McCain amendment has robbed him of any excuse, any evasion of
responsibility.
And yet he still evades it. Last week he spoke of Abu Ghraib as
something that had somehow happened to him and to his country,
almost as if he were not the commander-in-chief or president of the
country that had committed such abuse. When the evidence is
presented to him, he displaces it. He puts it to one side. In his mind
America is a force for good. And so it cannot commit evil. And if he
says that often enough it will somehow become true. In this way his
powers of denial kick in like a forcefield against reality.
It is, I think, an integral part of his own world view, which is that of a
former addict whose life was transformed by a rigid form of
fundamentalist Christianity. "[My faith] frees me to enjoy life and not
worry what comes next," he told the reporter Fred Barnes. When you
know you have been saved, when you know your motives are pure,
when, as Bush so often puts it, your "heart" is a good one, then it
follows that you cannot commit evil. Or if you do, it doesn't attach to
you. Somehow, it isn't yours, even when it is.
In this sense fundamentalist Christianity can enable evil by
promoting the lie that some humans have been saved from it. It
misses the deeper Christian truth that even good people can do bad
things. It forgets that what is noble about America is not that
Americans are somehow morally better than anyone else. But that it
is a country with a democratic system that helps expose the
constancy of human evil, and minimise its power through the rule of
law, democratic accountability and constitutional checks.
That system was devised by men who assumed the worst of people,
not the best, who expected Americans not to be better than any
other people, but the same. It was the wisdom of the system that
would save America, not the moral superiority of its people.
What is so tragic about this presidency is that it has simultaneously
proclaimed American goodness while dismantling the constitutional
protections and laws that guard against American evil. The good
intention has overwhelmed the fact of human fallibility. But reality —
human reality — eventually intrudes. Denial breaks down. The
physical evidence of torture, of murder, of atrocity, slowly
overwhelms the will to disbelieve in it.
I am sorry, Mr President. This is America. And you have helped
make it so.

Politics of Pandering!
President Bush radio address 3 June 2006

THE PRESIDENT: Good morning. Next week, the United States Senate will begin debate on a constitutional amendment that defines marriage in the United States as the union of a man and woman. On Monday, I will meet with a coalition of community leaders, constitutional scholars, family and civic organizations, and religious leaders. They're Republicans, Democrats, and independents who've come together to support this amendment. Today, I want to explain why I support the Marriage Protection Amendment, and why I'm urging Congress to pass it and send it to the states for ratification.
Marriage is the most enduring and important human institution, honored and encouraged in all cultures and by every religious faith. Ages of experience have taught us that the commitment of a husband and a wife to love and to serve one another promotes the welfare of children and the stability of society. Marriage cannot be cut off from its cultural, religious, and natural roots without weakening this good influence on society. Government, by recognizing and protecting marriage, serves the interests of all.
In our free society, people have the right to choose how they live their lives. And in a free society, decisions about such a fundamental social institution as marriage should be made by the people -- not by the courts. The American people have spoken clearly on this issue, both through their representatives and at the ballot box. In 1996, Congress approved the Defense of Marriage Act by overwhelming bipartisan majorities in both the House and Senate, and President Clinton signed it into law. And since then, voters in 19 states have approved amendments to their state constitutions that protect the traditional definition of marriage. And today, 45 of the 50 states have either a state constitutional amendment or statute defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman. These amendments and laws express a broad consensus in our country for protecting the institution of marriage.
Unfortunately, activist judges and some local officials have made an aggressive attempt to redefine marriage in recent years. Since 2004, state courts in Washington, California, Maryland, and New York have overturned laws protecting marriage in those states. And in Nebraska, a federal judge overturned a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.
These court decisions could have an impact on our whole Nation. The Defense of Marriage Act declares that no state is required to accept another state's definition of marriage. If that act is overturned by activist courts, then marriages recognized in one city or state might have to be recognized as marriages everywhere else. That would mean that every state would have to recognize marriages redefined by judges in Massachusetts or local officials in San Francisco, no matter what their own laws or state constitutions say. This national question requires a national solution, and on an issue of such profound importance, that solution should come from the people, not the courts.
An amendment to the Constitution is necessary because activist courts have left our Nation with no other choice. The constitutional amendment that the Senate will consider next week would fully protect marriage from being redefined, while leaving state legislatures free to make their own choices in defining legal arrangements other than marriage. A constitutional amendment is the most democratic solution to this issue, because it must be approved by two-thirds of the House and Senate and then ratified by three-fourths of the 50 state legislatures.
As this debate goes forward, we must remember that every American deserves to be treated with tolerance, respect, and dignity. All of us have a duty to conduct this discussion with civility and decency toward one another, and all people deserve to have their voices heard. A constitutional amendment will put a decision that is critical to American families and American society in the hands of the American people, which is exactly where it belongs. Democracy, not court orders, should decide the future of marriage in America.
Thank you for listening.

The Great Paradox of Iraq

FROM ANDREW SULLIVAN
It has been there from the start and it still, frankly, confounds me. We were told by the president that the Iraq war was the critical battle in the war on terror, an effort of enormous stakes that we couldn't possibly lose. And then he went to war with half the troops necessary to win, with no plan for the aftermath, and refused to budge even when this became obvious to anyone with eyes and a brain. He says there is no greater friend or supporter of the troops, yet he sent them to do an impossible task, with insufficient numbers or support or even armor to accomplish the job. He said we face the equivalent of the Third World War and yet he has done nothing to increase the size of the military to meet the task. He said the invasion was to advance the principles of freedom and democracy, and yet he immediately abandoned those principles in our detention policy and has done more damage to the moral standing of the United States than anyone since the Vietnam war. He says he wants to build democracy, and yet he has gutted reconstruction funds, and withdrawn support for building democratic institutions. He said he will keep troops there until the job is done, and yet sustains a policy to draw down the troops as soon as possible.
There has always been a military solution to Iraq. There still is, as Fred Kagan recently showed in a long article in the Weekly Standard. It just required resources to achieve it, to pacify a post-totalitarian society, provide order and the context in which politics can happen. The American public would have approved the resources necessary, and made sacrifices if asked. And yet Bush has deliberately and by conscious choice allowed anarchy and terror to decimate Iraqi civil society. None of this helps the war; and none of it helps him. There are many times when I am simply baffled by the whole farce. Is he this stupid? Is he this blind? Or was this never a serious venture? Did Cheney and Rumsfeld never want to build a democracy in Iraq, just reduce it to rubble and chaos, while ensuring that Saddam could get no WMDs? Even now, I have no idea. But something here doesn't add up. Incompetence doesn't quite capture the enormity of the failure or the incoherence of the project. And so we stagger on, desperate for hope, but forced to confront the worst-managed war since Vietnam. Except the stakes are far, far higher than Vietnam. And the consequences of failure close to existential. I know that in part because Bush keeps telling us. Is he lying? Or is he just drowning in a job that he is simply unable to do?

The Senate debates marriage. by Fred Barnes

JUNE 6, 2006, is an important date, not only because it's the 62nd anniversary of D-Day. It's also the day the Senate will vote on the so-called marriage amendment, which would amend the Constitution to restrict marriage in America to a man and a woman.
It won't pass. A constitutional amendment requires a two-thirds majority in the Senate and the House. When the Senate voted in 2004, the amendment got only 48 votes. This time, it's likely to get more--probably between 52 and 58--in part because a powerful and unusually ecumenical religious coalition is now backing the amendment. And President Bush, despite his wife Laura's admonition that the marriage issue ought to be kept out of politics, plans to host a pro-amendment event at the White House and speak out in favor of the amendment.
Once dismissed as a sop to social conservatives, the proposed amendment has become a serious rallying point for opponents of same-sex marriage. The June 6 vote will put senators on the record and make their position on the amendment a potential campaign issue. And the formation of the religious coalition means the issue won't go away soon.
Much of the conventional wisdom about the amendment and the marriage issue turns out to be wrong. For instance, the amendment is not being pushed by Republicans as a wedge issue aimed at dividing Democratic voters. Republican senators regard the issue as touchy and awkward. In fact, they agree with First Lady Laura Bush, who said on Fox News Sunday that the subject of gay marriage "requires a lot of sensitivity" and shouldn't "be used as a campaign tool." They'd prefer the issue--and the amendment--go away.
When Majority Leader Bill Frist asked Senate Republican committee chairmen in 2004 if they wanted him to schedule a vote on the amendment, none urged him to. Frist did anyway. This year, the same was true. He received no pressure from Republican senators for a vote. Instead, his talks with Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council led Frist to put at least a day of debate on the amendment, then a vote, on the Senate schedule.
The hands-off attitude of Republican senators, Perkins says, "does not reflect what's happening in the states." Whenever a referendum barring same-sex marriage gets on the ballot, it's nearly always approved by 70 percent or more of voters, he noted.
A second misconception is that it's sufficient for an elected official merely to declare his opposition to gay marriage. It's not anymore. The question now is whether an official will support efforts to block gay marriage from being imposed by judges at the federal or state level. And the way to do that in the Senate is to vote for the amendment.
The conventional wisdom in the political community is also wrong on another point: that the marriage amendment won't have a significant role in the race for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. It will. A Gallup poll found two-thirds of Republicans back the amendment. Perkins, for one, insists the marriage issue has "reached the same plane as the right to life issue" among Republican voters. "I don't think you can win the presidential nomination without endorsing the marriage amendment," Perkins says.
This is a huge problem for Senator John McCain, the Republican frontrunner in 2008. McCain has moved to the right on taxes and abortion and recently reconciled with Jerry Falwell, the prominent conservative Christian. He drew sharp criticism for the Falwell overture and is leery of shifting again and being accused of pandering to the Christian Right.
McCain voted against the amendment in 2004. And he repeated his opposition on Fox News Sunday last month. "I will vote against it because I believe very strongly, first of all, in the sanctity of union between man and woman, but I also believe that the states should make these decisions." Many religious conservatives regard this as an unacceptable dodge.
Why? Because states have already been thwarted in their efforts to make these decisions. The problem is not voters or legislators. They overwhelmingly support traditional marriage. Thirty-seven states have enacted laws in recent years--19 by referendum, the others by statute--to bar gay marriage. The problem is judges. On May 16, a Georgia judge struck down the state's ban on gay marriage, which had been enacted in 2004 with 76 percent of the vote. The judge seized on a technical point, ruling the referendum covered two issues, same-sex marriage and civil unions, and not one, as Georgia law required. In truth, the referendum was drafted to deal with one issue, the protection of heterosexual marriage. At least nine states face lawsuits challenging their traditional marriage laws.
In Nebraska as well, a federal judge on May 12 nullified a referendum barring gay marriage. And in Massachusetts, the state supreme court by a 4-3 vote imposed same sex marriage, basing its decision on a state constitution adopted centuries before gay marriage became an issue.
In response, the Religious Coalition for Marriage was formed specifically to back the amendment. It grew out of two conferences of religious leaders and academics organized by Professor Robert George of Princeton. George and others found politicians, even conservative ones, are "afraid" to oppose gay marriage by backing the amendment: "They don't like to talk about it." The coalition was created to put strong public pressure on both politicians and judges.
The coalition's initial statement said: "We take the unprecedented stand of uniting to call for a constitutional amendment to establish a uniform national definition of marriage as the exclusive union of one man and one woman. . . . This is the only measure that will adequately protect marriage from those who would circumvent the legislative process and force a redefinition of it on the whole of our society."
What's surprising about the coalition is its breadth. It includes all eight Catholic cardinals in America, liberal and conservative, plus officials of the Southern Baptist Convention, the Greek Orthodox Church, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, the Church of God in Christ, the National Association of Evangelicals, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons), among others.
As for Bush, he will appear on June5 in the Rose Garden before a gathering of amendment supporters and, a White House official says, "strongly support" the amendment. The president has rarely mentioned the amendment in the past. The choice of the Rose Garden as a venue means he is raising the marriage amendment to a higher level on his agenda, his wife's advice notwithstanding.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard and author of Rebel-in-Chief (Crown Forum).

Would you buy a used White House ticket from this man?
PROFILE Al Gore By Andrew Sullivan (From London Sunday Times)
Al Gore once cherished the illusion that he and his future wife “Tipper” were prototypes for the romantic couple in Erich Segal’s novel Love Story. When the author begged to demur, Gore was left with egg all over his face.
This public humiliation seems emblematic of Gore’s life. The mantle of the most powerful man in the world might have descended on Vice-President Gore’s shoulders in 1998 if Bill Clinton had been forced to resign over the Monica Lewinsky affair. But “Slick Willy” wriggled out of it.
Even Gore’s best jokes seemed to backfire. In a quip about his perceived woodenness he said: “They opened up my leg and found termites.” It merely set up a New York comic’s gag that Clinton’s dog, Buddy, mistook him for a tree.
In 2000 Gore could have beaten George W Bush to the presidency, only to have the job wrenched from his grasp by a questionable margin and a capricious Supreme Court. His fellow Democrats damned “Gore the Bore” for losing and accepting defeat too graciously. Retiring into a sort of Nixonian exile, he was seen as a figure of scorn and pity.
Now Gore, 58, is back, miraculously transformed into a bulked-up Clark Kent figure greeted rapturously at the forefront of America’s ecological awakening. At Cannes last week he launched his global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth with a panache that upstaged Hollywood stars.
If Tom Hanks opted for coyness, Gore made the grand entrance, bowling over journalists with a passion and fluent charm that he manifestly lacked six years ago. Asked how he would like to be addressed, he replied smoothly: “Your Adequacy.”
His sleek hair was greyer and for a tall man he looked even bigger. Reports that he had become self-conscious about his weight were countered by an interviewer’s observation: “It looked like solid muscle to me.” This week he brings his message to Britain.
Positive reaction to the film, recording his personal credo on the “planetary emergency”, has started a buzz among Democrats on whether Gore will run again in 2008. To those who harbour doubts about the polarising effect of their frontrunner, Hillary Clinton, it seems like a good idea.
In Gore’s camp there is a feeling of unfinished business with the Clintons. A “friend” was quoted last week as saying: “If Clinton hadn’t been impeached, Al Gore would be president and the world would be a different place.” Clinton’s side retorts that if Gore had run even a half-decent campaign he would have won.
The two men were said to be no longer on speaking terms when they left the White House but they have evidently made up. “We’ve just been through too much together,” Gore said recently. “We have a bond that’ll never be shaken.”
However, a former Gore adjutant told New York magazine last week that Gore’s relations with Hillary are not so harmonious. “He intensely dislikes her. It all goes back to 1993 and 1994, when there were two vice-presidents: Al Gore and Hillary Clinton. They fought for turf, for resources, for projects. It was like a sibling rivalry over who was the second-most important person in the White House.”
The Gore 2008 bandwagon is gathering momentum. He has important backers in Hollywood, Silicon Valley and New York. In Washington, where only one congressman has called openly for Gore to run, there is more caution. The general tenor is that Gore was “god-awful” in 1988, a disaster in 2000 and would bomb again in 2008.
Yet Democrats desperately need to win and if Gore suddenly looks like a winner, he might get the ticket. As one of Bush’s most outspoken critics he has made searing indictments of the Iraq war, wiretapping and state-run torture.
But will he run? His ambiguous replies to this increasingly urgent question range from “I don’t plan to be a candidate again for national office”, to “politics is behind me”. He told The Sunday Times in Cannes last week: “I don’t see any circumstances to change my mind about being president.”
This looks like smart dissembling to political analysts. According to one, the American public loves Al the ecological crusader precisely because he’s not running. “But as soon as that changes, all the stored-up venom will be poured on top of him.”
Gore’s credentials on global warming are rock solid. Unlike the late conversion of our own newly minted standard-bearer, David Attenborough, Gore’s interest dates from his undergraduate days at Harvard where he was taught by Roger Revelle, the first scientist to monitor carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.
In 1981 Gore held the first congressional hearing on the subject. At the end of the decade, his son’s near death in a car accident made him take stock. “I decided this was the issue that I was going to focus on more than any other.”
A call from Bill Clinton to the White House in 1992 put Gore’s planned documentary about climate change on hold. Then a couple of years ago Laurie David, an influential Hollywood figure, saw his computerised slide show and persuaded him to make it into a film.
The project is only one of several interests. Gore lectures at two universities in his native Tennessee. He sits on the board of Apple and is reported to have made a fortune as a “senior adviser” to Google. Then there’s Current TV, his youth-oriented cable network, and Generation Investment Management, an equity fund.
He was always a brainbox. Born in 1948, he spent his childhood in Washington hotel rooms as the son of Senator Albert Gore, a Capitol Hill wheeler-dealer from Tennessee. He was a 17-year-old school athlete when he met Mary Elizabeth Aitcheson at a graduation dance in 1965. She owed her nickname Tipper to her childhood rendition of the song Tippy Tippy Tin.
She followed him to Harvard, where they met Segal, then a classical scholar. Hence the confusion over Love Story, whose lead character owed much to Gore’s room-mate, the putative Hollywood actor Tommy Lee Jones.
After two years at law school and a year studying divinity, Gore did a stint in Vietnam as a reporter for an army newspaper. He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1976, making himself an expert on the cold war and the constitution.
A decade later he ran for the White House as a self-styled “raging moderate”, but his campaign to win the Democratic nomination wilted.
Gore was a good running-mate for Clinton, for despite the obvious differences between the backslapper and the introvert, the two men had quite a lot in common — including marijuana, although only Gore confessed to inhaling.
He became the most active vice-president in American history, given three high-profile roles: the environment, eliminating government waste and the information superhighway. His claim that he invented the internet has been disputed.
In failing to win the presidency in 2000, Gore has been accused of squandering the assets won during the previous eight years of peace and prosperity, including Clinton’s enduring popularity.
His campaign was marked by timidity and an identity crisis brought on by too many advisers. This seemed to be a repeat of his 1988 campaign, of which he wrote later: “I began to doubt my own political judgment so I began to ask the pollsters and professional politicians what they thought I ought to talk about.”
He was told to rein back on the environment, the very subject that transformed him into a passionate and attractive figure. A former aide was quoted as saying: “He set up a campaign that was run by people who didn’t know him, who were too arrogant to get to know him, who didn’t particularly like him.”
He remained in purdah during the 2004 presidential election, explaining that another rerun of Gore v Bush would be divisive. People said then he was keeping his powder dry for 2008. Now the refrain is deafening.
Gore is not above teasing his supporters. “I am a recovering politician,” he is apt to say, before adding: “But you always have to worry about a relapse.”

From our June issue: Wasn’t the GOP supposed to be the Testosterone Party?
By Francis WilkinsonWeb Exclusive: 05.22.06
Print Friendly Email Article “Terrorist attacks are not caused by the use of strength; they are invited by the perception of weakness.”
President George W. Bush has made that statement many times. So has Vice President Dick Cheney. And Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Multiple principals endlessly repeating themselves -- that’s the mark of a premium White House talking point. Or in this case, a kind of gospel -- poll-tested, market-driven, swing-voter–approved, and sanctioned by Kardinal Rove himself.
Like its religious counterpart, political liturgy does not reward literal interpretation. The “weakness” that invites our destruction is not a measurable, structural weakness of nations. It is more insidious than that. It is the weakness of men. Certain men of uncertain will. Unmanly men. Men who lack the grit and determination to command other men to expend their grit and determination in battle. Girly men. Men who snuggle before the domestic hearth of the Mommy Party. Men who fuss and fret over Mother Nature (when what she really needs is a good drilling). Men who wish to restrain the natural urges of natural men, to smother initiative and stifle competition beneath the suffocating pleats and ruffles of the Nanny State. Men who are effete. Men who cut and run. Men without guns or guts or glory. Men whose weakness abases and undermines the rugged individualism and frontier can-do that made the United States Numero Uno.
We have met the enemy. And he adores Judy Garland.
No matter what ideological hue he projects, whether conservatism, corporatism, idealistic imperialism, or his studied tracings of Ronald Reagan’s rugged sentimentalism, Bush has made manliness the centerpiece of his persona and his politics. Bush’s flight-deck performance aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln -- “Mission Accomplished” -- long ago became Esperanto for “hubris.” But as psychologist Stephen J. Ducat noted in his provocative book on masculine anxiety, The Wimp Factor, the event began as a ballsy celebration, first and foremost, of Bush’s manhood. Observing the President’s flight suit, which expressly accentuated his crotch, G. Gordon Liddy, the right’s uncensored id, noted: “It makes the best of his manly characteristic.”
We are in our sixth year of government by gonads. Through conscious, concerted, disciplined, and relentless effort, Bush and his party have succeeded in cowing critics and defeating Democrats by advancing images of, and insinuations about, manliness in the public sphere. In the Republican political schemata, this is a man’s world. Men have made it dangerous. And only men -- real Republican men -- can make it safe again.

The Reagan administration introduced the nation to War Wimps, that bellicose band of conservatives who so relish American wars (provided other Americans fight them). In prevailing against their liberal critics, the WW’s learned a valuable lesson: The public is more impressed by a politician’s aggressiveness in the present than by any failures to launch in the past. As a result, even the most unlikely tough guys began kicking up sand at the beach. Orrin Hatch, perhaps the Senate’s most fastidious prig, with a proclivity for French cuffs and pink ties, declared Democrats “the party of homosexuals.” Senator Trent Lott, who volunteered for cheerleading duty at Ole Miss but cartwheeled away when Vietnam beckoned, proclaimed of Republicans, “I think that we are the party of Mars.”
With the rise of Bush, Cheney, and Rove (WW’s all), the bully boy behavior reached new heights. The one resounding message Republicans have deployed -- over and over and over -- since September 11 is that Democrats are weak. And we all know terror attacks are invited by the perception of weakness. What’s more, virtually every subsidiary Republican attack -- from gay marriage (Homosexual Party) to taxes (Nanny Party) to abortion (whatever you say, dear) -- has exploited traditional gender stereotypes and reinforced the theme of Democratic wimpery.
For three straight elections, from 2000 through 2004, Republicans have outmanned the Democrats. Al Gore was dismissed as a hectoring schoolmarm, John Kerry as a flaky croissant, a kept man, a tin soldier. In between, Bush made no bones about the price of Democratic pusillanimity: Under its brief Democratic majority, he said, the U.S. Senate was simply “not interested in the security of the American people.” And with another Election Day approaching, and their party depleted of both issues and credibility, the Republicans will no doubt seek to emasculate the opposition once again.
But the testosterone is no longer flowing like $75 crude. Multiple mission failures have exposed Republican talking points as so much bluster. To underscore the farce, the gods of metaphor illustrated the tragic potential of power placed in irresponsible hands; after his beer-and-hunting nightmare in Texas, Vice-President Bottom awoke with an ass’s head on his shoulders.
Now, rising out of the broken-back shamble of Republican machismo, is a veritable platoon of Democratic men. They have exceptionally macho profiles and an appetite for power. They are politically diverse but united in their contempt for the bully in the pulpit. They are fed up with schoolyard put-downs. They are disgusted by incompetence and callousness. And they are running for Congress.
* * *
The President was right after all: The perception of weakness has indeed invited attack. Democrats are this year making their strongest run at power since 1992. The quality of the candidates is particularly striking. At last count, there were more than 50 war veterans running for Congress as Democrats. In addition, a former pro quarterback, Heath Shuler, is competing as a Democrat for a North Carolina congressional seat the party has coveted for years. A Democratic sheriff is running in Indiana, a district attorney in upstate New York, and a blunt-spoken “cowboy” entrepreneur in Florida.
For a party that has launched unprecedented numbers of women into Congress in recent years, this latest crop of candidates has a remarkably musky bouquet. Perhaps it’s the combat boots. Patrick Murphy, running against a freshman Republican in a district outside Philadelphia, is one of an endless stream of ambitious attorneys eager to become pols. But when Murphy, 32, introduces himself to voters in the district, he distinguishes himself by mentioning his tour of duty in Baghdad with the 82nd Airborne.
Joe Sestak, a Naval Academy graduate and retired vice admiral, is threatening Republican incumbent Curt Weldon in another Pennsylvania district. Sestak, who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, calls the Iraq War a “tragic misadventure” and, like Murphy, supports a staged withdrawal of U.S. troops.
One of the most intriguing Democratic campaigns this year belongs to James Webb, who is running for Senate in Virginia. Webb is a Vietnam veteran and former secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration. Until recently, he had seemed comfortably at home in the Republican Party. If Webb survives his primary, he will run against Republican Senator George Allen, namesake son of the famous NFL football coach and a man who, between cowboy boots, chewing tobacco, and the noose that once hung in his office, has worked overtime grooming a distinctly Republican style of toughness. Webb, however, appears to be spoiling for a fight above all with the commander in chief. An accomplished novelist and essayist, he has blasted Bush in print for dishonoring the service of veterans (John McCain, John Kerry, Jack Murtha, Max Cleland) who disagree with him. But seething between the lines -- and sometimes breaking into the text -- is Webb’s palpable contempt for grand strategists who “have never seen the inside of a military uniform.”
Many of these candidates -- including Murphy, Sestak, and possibly even Webb -- have a reasonable shot at victory if the gathering Democratic wave hits shore in November. The 15 seats Democrats need to take over the House of Representatives may be within reach. However, most members of the Democratic “Band of Brothers” will surely fail. Gerrymandered districts, a still-polarized electorate, and the challenger’s gauntlet of money and execution will in many cases be sufficient obstacles to victory. Nevertheless, these Democratic men, many of whom launched campaigns without having been recruited by party leaders, may also be signs of a larger cultural stirring.
It wasn’t long ago that members of the Dixie Chicks were isolated in their criticism of Bush’s war. Now, in the he-man precincts of twang, the boys are making noise, too. Merle Haggard is growling about a nation gone to hell in a handbasket. Cranky old Neil Young is hankering for impeachment. And Tim McGraw says Bush’s failure in New Orleans “erases everything that’s great about our country.” McGraw has even floated the notion of a future run for office as a Tennessee stud -- and Democrat.
There are limits to the political appeal of macho resumes, of course. In recent years, Democrats have been undone on the issue of national security despite impressive martial credentials. The GOP template for defeating John Kerry was established in the 2002 Senate race in Georgia. Country club Republican and draft avoider Saxby Chambliss defeated Senator Max Cleland by accusing Cleland, who lost three limbs in Vietnam, of being weak on national security. Nearly four years later, Democrats are still livid. “Having the [war] credential didn’t keep the Republicans from trashing Max Cleland in one of the most egregious, disgusting things they’ve ever done,” a senior party operative says. “They’ll go just as low this year.”
As we begin our election-year descent, perhaps it behooves us to consider the value of challenging, rather than perpetuating, ancient archetypes of manhood and demeaning stereotypes of weakness. If Democratic values mean anything, then surely they mean to make gay bashing, misogyny, and the like the political road less traveled, and human dignity a more common cause. The 21st century may well dictate such a course, even if Democrats fail to chart it. Indicators ranging from education and income to reproductive autonomy suggest the new century will be marked and quite likely defined by an ascendance of feminine power. (The political arithmetic is particularly persuasive: Just two decades ago, there was a lone female in the U.S. Senate. Today, there are 14, complemented by eight women governors.)
Yet for richer and for poorer, manliness remains a cornerstone of the arena. The question right now concerns what kind of manliness evidenced by what kind of men. The administration’s manifest impotence in Iraq, New Orleans, and -- increasingly -- Washington has restricted its political options. But it has also damaged its exclusive claims to masculine prowess. Because they loved it too much and exploited it too nakedly in the overwrought hours since 9-11, Bush and the Republicans have discredited their brand of muscle politics. But for five years they deployed it with vindictive and disciplined aggression. They seemed to have fun while it lasted.
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Like our own era, the turn of the previous century was a time of feminine assertion and masculine anxiety. Women were creating new roles in public life, even threatening to invade the voting booth. Men, confronted by feminine encroachment on one front, suffered an erosion of autonomy on the other. The American frontier was officially closed in 1890, restricting the free range of land as well as the imagination. At the same time, men were moving by the millions from field to factory and office, surrendering their independence and capacity for self-definition.
In response, a conscious effort was launched to re-masculate the great American indoors. Men’s social groups -- Elks, Knights, Masons -- spread across the land, while jingoists trumpeted manly virtues as the basis of progress. It wasn’t long before even the Paschal Lamb was pumping iron. “Lord save us,” evangelist Billy Sunday pleaded, “from off-handed, flabby-cheeked, brittle-boned, weak-kneed, thin-skinned, pliable, plastic, spineless, effeminate, sissified, three-carat Christianity.”
Riding this uneasy masculine tide, William McKinley, in his 1896 campaign literature, assured voters that the 53-year-old Republican was “one of the best examples of courageous, persevering, vigorous manhood that the nation has ever produced.”
After the U.S.S. Maine sank in Havana Harbor in 1898, President McKinley was called upon to prove it. When at first he refrained from retaliation against Spain, McKinley was subjected to the jingoes’ feminizing derision. Editorials cited a “great need of a man in the White House” and “manly and resolute” responses to Spain’s treachery. Teddy Roosevelt, eager to make manliness the fulcrum of any drama, complained, “McKinley has no more backbone than a chocolate éclair.”
McKinley eventually demonstrated his backbone, bending to the jingoes’ demands for war. Though the proximate cause of the conflict resided in Cuba, the American defeat of Spain led McKinley to annex the Philippines. The White House had hoped U.S. troops would be greeted in Manila as liberators. Instead, U.S. forces were soon engulfed in a bloody, extended fight against homegrown insurgents. More than 2,000 U.S. soldiers were killed and hundreds of thousands of Filipinos slaughtered. An occupying army far from home, U.S. troops were frightened and enraged by their inability to tell friend from foe. They soon resorted to unconventional measures. The American public had been encouraged to view the war as a character-building exercise for its virile young men. It was shocked to discover that some U.S. soldiers were systematically torturing the prisoners under their control.
When Karl Rove cited McKinley as his inspiration for Bush’s presidency, the Philippine-American War wasn’t what he had in mind. Instead, Rove, who focused on McKinley in graduate school, noted that the 25th President had ushered in a Republican reign of 36 years, interrupted only by the two terms of Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Rove envisioned Bush at the head of a similar juggernaut. He found a historical parallel that wasn’t there. And he overlooked one that was.
In high school in Utah, Rove was a self-described “nerd” who carried a briefcase to class. In the cafeteria, he was not seated at the right hand of the quarterback. Though Rove found no release for his aggression on the athletic field, he managed to channel it into another type of contest. Politics, said one of Rove’s college professors, was Karl’s “varsity sport.”
The practice of national politics in the age of the 24-hour news cycle is so all-consuming that excellence fairly demands obsession. It blots out other, healthier claims on personal time. Rove has “hundreds” of friends, his wife Darby has said, but “no one he’s intimate with.” When relationships are transactional, intimacy is a hindrance; it undermines control. And Rove is very much in control. Consider this first-person vignette by reporter Ron Suskind in the January 2003 issue of Esquire:
Inside, Rove was talking to an aide about some political stratagem in some state that had gone awry and a political operative who had displeased him. I paid it no mind and reviewed a jotted list of questions I hoped to ask. But after a moment, it was like ignoring a tornado flinging parked cars. “We will fuck him. Do you hear me? We will fuck him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever fucked him.”Anal rape is always an arresting metaphor. For all I know, Rove deploys it hourly for its salutary effect on subordinates, colleagues, and rivals. But on that particular day, he made sure that a well-connected journalist heard every word. Rove was going to fuck somebody, ruin them, fuck them like they’d never been fucked. And he wanted every asshole in Washington to know about it.
Time will tell whether Rove has understood the politics of realignment. But there is no question he has mastered the dark arts of intimidation, emasculation, and other forms of political aggression. And in Bush, Rove found a candidate who combines an instinct for iconic masculine poses with an aggressive streak that complements Rove’s own.
When Bush parades to a podium, his arms cantilevered to the side to make room for imaginary mass and muscle, he looks like a freshman swimming upstream against the hormonal currents of a high-school hallway. It’s not enough for Bush to impress upon you the fact that he is leader of the world’s sole superpower. He also wants you to think he can beat you up.
However, Bush is also a complicated case. Eager to telegraph his masculinity through walk and talk and posture, he nonetheless appears personally unthreatened by women, blacks, and gays, an immunity that distinguishes him from his culturally reactive, ever-anxious political base. He allowed himself to be tutored by a younger black woman -- not in the domestic rigmarole of the welfare state but in the manly crucible of foreign affairs, where presidencies are made or broken. (He then let it be known he had been tutored by her and eventually named her secretary of state.) Of equal note, Bush’s forays into homophobia are cynically electoral, not emotionally authentic; as soon as the polls close, the antigay claptrap is put in storage until it’s needed to rouse the base next season. The biennial denigration of a few million Americans is nothing personal -- just the price of power.
Much has been made of Bush’s Oedipal drama over Iraq. But the father’s legacy is evident everywhere -- certainly in W’s equation of masculine aggression with political survival. Before he became leader of the free world, Bush Sr. was a sports star, a war hero, a successful wildcatter in the rough and tumble drilling fields of west Texas. Yet he was tarred as a “wimp,” depicted in political cartoons as an old biddy or, in Doonesbury, as so light in his loafers that he constituted no more than an asterisk.
If the father was too wimpy to master the arena, what of the son? Cheerleader, draft evader, oil business failure, he fell short of the father on nearly every masculine measure. For George W. Bush, no amount of aggression or masculine posing could be too much. To prevail in a brutal world of men like Karl Rove, W. was going to have to be one hell of a hard-ass.
The father’s demise surely shaped the son’s rise. But the raw material was there to be molded. Bush’s college yearbook contains a photograph of him playing rugby. His left arm is wrapped around the neck of an opposing player, who is carrying the ball. His right hand is in a fist and appears to be sucker-punching his opponent in the face. The caption reads: “George Bush delivers illegal, but gratifying right hook to opposing ball carrier.” A portrait of the cheap-shot artist as a young man.
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The people who set Bush’s reflexive right hook in motion are not female, black, or gay. They are men much like Bush -- but with one powerful difference. A USA Today story in the wake of 9-11 reported that Bush had told others in the White House he believed “confronting the enemy” was a chance “for him and his fellow baby boomers” to display the same valor their fathers had shown in World War II. If true, this desire must be powerfully reinforced by his knowledge that, given a previous opportunity to prove his manly bona fides, he had demurred. Meanwhile, the very existence of “fellow baby boomers” who don’t share his need for vindication, who rose to the challenge of his generation while he was holed up in Texas and Alabama doing God knows what, is a perpetual affront to Bush. It’s hardly a wonder why men with combat medals pinned to broad chests might get under this President’s skin.
John McCain, John Kerry, Jack Murtha. Each was the subject of all-out, no holds barred, viciously personal attacks by the Bush camp. Though their politics could not be more different one from another, each of the three had to be assaulted, destroyed, because each in his way is a genuine article that exposes Bush’s copy.
Murtha, who’s been there, anguishes over the caskets and mangled bodies that Bush can’t even bring himself to acknowledge. Kerry spartanly shouldered the noblesse oblige that Bush shirked. McCain proved in Hanoi that beneath a party animal exterior much like young Bush’s, he was not only a tough son of a bitch but an honorable one. Today, McCain, like Bush, walks with his arms awkwardly extended from his sides. But he does so not as a self-conscious pose but because his tortured muscles won’t permit a more natural resolution.
Voters have frequently voiced appreciation that they “know where Bush stands” even if they don’t agree with him. They’re right, of course. Except in a few notably catastrophic instances, in which Bush plays the part of a lost man who refuses to ask for directions, he deserves credit for staking out terrain and manfully holding to it. But unlike his opposites, Bush also frequently employs aggression without honor, and his drive for dominance has been too little tempered by leadership.
The attacks of 9-11 remain the defining context of the Bush White House not because the President rose to the challenge of a new threat and a changing era. At best, it seems he will leave office with the national interest strategically impaired. But Bush, Rove, and Cheney understood, as they so often repeat, that 9-11 “changed everything.” Because they recognized fear in the eyes of the people. And they exploited it without compunction. They surely think better of themselves than that. But that’s the kind of men they are.
After the two erect, once amusingly phallic, towers collapsed, they left behind a burning, violated hole. We’d been fucked all right, like we’d never been fucked. And due to the déjà-vu-all-over-again phenomenon that is cable television, a technology thankfully absent during Pearl Harbor and Britain’s torching of the White House, we were scared like we’d never been scared.
Anyone who has witnessed political focus groups in recent years has had a front-row seat to the primal effects of terrorism on the American psyche. During the 2004 campaign, says a senior Democratic adviser, “married women, regardless of where they lived, were sure their local community was going to be hit.”
That’s an exaggeration, of course. But a slight one. Bush’s machismo appealed not only to anxious men with a primal urge to strike back at the bad guys, but to women -- especially women with children -- whose new world could never be made safe enough. In the presidential election that succeeded 9-11, Bush won 5.7 million more votes from women than he had in the election that preceded it.
From 9-11 on, Bush ran a protection racket. He would do whatever it took to keep the neighborhood safe. He would stiff the United Nations and the Geneva Conventions. He would strike preemptively. He would lock people up without charge. He would swagger and tell the bad guys, “You can run but you cannot hide,” and swagger and call the Democrats “weak.” He would promise repeatedly to “protect the American people.” And on Tuesdays in November, he would come around to collect.
But the protection racket came undone when Katrina blew the roof off New Orleans and ripped the façade off the White House. Everyone now knows that George W. Bush is incapable of protecting us. We’re like the settlers in a frontier town who discover that the strong, silent sheriff in the jailhouse window is a department store mannequin.
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Into this void marches the Democrats’ “Band of Brothers.” It falls on them to resuscitate a more honorable, less bullying style of masculine politics -- and to make it a winner. To be honest, they don’t look much different from Al Gore, Max Cleland, or John Kerry -- three capital losers. They are battle-hardened but essentially decent. Skeptical of the boasts of war, but mindful of the present dangers. Many are political newcomers, sniffing opportunity in the shifting winds, subject equally to the neophyte’s fatal mistake and to the beginner’s blind luck.
It’s not really the men who have changed but the times. 9-11 changed everything. Then Katrina changed the contours of 9-11.
After watching Cleland and Kerry get pummeled, our Democratic war veterans are primed to counterpunch. Patrick Murphy, the son of a Philly cop, is acutely aware of the recent history of Republican attacks. He pays conspicuous tribute to Murtha on his campaign Web site. He hopes to have Cleland into the district to campaign. He says he is prepared for hits below the belt. “If they try to dishonor my military service,” he says, “I’m going to hit right back.”
Go get ’em boys. I hope every one of those guys -- even those in races that are positively unwinnable -- wrestles his Republican opponent to the ground and roars, asserting his Democratic manhood. We need the catharsis.
But after having wallowed in our fear these last five years, maybe what we need next are leaders who will raise us above it. The one man who taught us better than any other to conquer fear was no Governor Terminator. His muscles were unimpressive. He had no physical swagger to him at all. His military experience was a desk job. He wore no cowboy gear. He smoked cigarettes not like a Marlboro Man but filtered through a slender, feminine holder that could have been a prop from the Follies Bergere. He didn’t promise to protect us. He made us believe we could protect ourselves -- from the violence of fascism and the vicissitudes of capitalism alike. And he handed us the tools to do the job. We built the better part of the American century on the back of an aristocratic, polio-addled cripple. Now that was a man.
Francis Wilkinson is a communications consultant and speechwriter in Nyack, New York.

The following is the text of the audio message attributed to Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and released on the internet.

The transcript was run by the As-Sahab website, one of the outlets used by the organization, under the headline 'A Testimony to the Truth'. 'From Usama bin Muhammad bin Ladin to the American people: peace be upon he who has followed the Guidance. 'This is a brief message whose topic is my testimony on behalf of the Muslim prisoners you are holding, and in it I will talk about the truth concerning them, which is something which the Bush administration hates and is hostile to. 'I begin by talking about the honorable brother Zacarias Moussaoui. The truth is that he has no connection whatsoever with the events of Sept 11th, and I am certain of what I say, because I was responsible for entrusting the 19 brothers -- Allah have mercy upon them -- with those raids, and I did not assign brother Zacarias to be with them on that mission. 'And his confession that he was assigned to participate in those raids is a false confession which no intelligent person doubts is a result of the pressure put upon him for the past four and a half years. 'And were this pressure lifted from him for him to return to his normal state, he would state the fact I mentioned. And among the things that confirm this fact is that the participants in Sept 11th were two groups: pilots and support teams for each pilot in order to control the aircraft. 'And since Zacarias Moussaoui was learning how to fly, it follows that he was not component number 20 from the teams which helped to control the airplanes, as your government previously claimed, and your government knows this fact with certainty. 'And if Moussaoui was studying aviation to become a pilot of one of the planes, then let him tell us the names of those assigned to help him control the plane. 'But he won't be able to tell us their names, for a simple reason: that in fact they don't exist. This is from one perspective, and from another perspective, the brother Moussaoui was arrested two weeks before the events, and had he known anything -- however little -- about the Sept 11th group, we would have told the brother Commander Mohamed Atta and his brothers -- Allah have mercy upon them -- to leave America immediately before their affair was exposed. 'And with this it becomes clear to even the novice investigator, not to mention the seasoned one, that there is no connection between him and the events of Sept 11th. 'And then I call to memory my brothers the prisoners in Guantanamo -- may Allah free them all -- and I state the fact, about which I also am certain, that all the prisoners of Guantanamo, who were captured in 2001 and the first half of 2002 and who number in the hundreds, have no connection whatsoever to the events of Sept 11th, and even stranger is that many of them have no connection with al-Qaida in the first place, and even more amazing is that some of them oppose al-Qaidas methodology of calling for war with America. 'And this is in addition to the arrest of those who were working in the relief agencies, like Abu Abdul Aziz al-Mutrafi, or those working in the media, like Sami al-Hajj and Taysir Alouni, who was imprisoned at the instigation of the American administration. 'So the conclusion is that all the prisoners to date have no connection with the events of Sept 11th and knew nothing about them, with the exception of two of the brothers, may Allah free them all. 'Bush and his administration are aware of this fact, but they avoid mentioning it, for reasons not hidden to the discerning. Among these reasons is that it is necessary to create justifications for the massive spending of hundreds of billions on the Defense Department and other agencies in their war against the Mujahideen. 'My mentioning of these facts isnt out of hope that Bush and his party will treat our brothers fairly in their cases, because that is something no rational person expects, but rather it is meant to expose the oppression, injustice and arbitrariness of your administration in using force and the reactions that result from that. 'This is from one perspective, and from another perspective, perhaps there will one day come from the Americans someone who desires justice and fairness, and that is the path to security and safety, if you are interested in it. This is what needed to be said. And may peace be upon he who has followed the Guidance.'