Outmoded concept of ‘manliness’ sets stage for protection racket

[ProSense]

Outmoded concept of ‘manliness’ sets stage for protection racket

By Ellen Goodman | Comments(0)

For those who have ever wondered when a promise of protection becomes a protection racket, this is your moment.

We now have the forced admission that in 2003 George W. Bush himself approved the leaking of classified intelligence gathered before the Iraq War. He didn’t let it all leak out. He authorized a trickle of information buttressing his case that Saddam Hussein had been a nuclear threat.

Information that had already been discredited.

After manipulating this faucet of fear, the president then defended the war in the name of national security, casting himself as the country’s father-protector. In short, he sold himself as the person we needed to protect us from the fear he provoked. Welcome to the protection racket.

And lest you forget, his re-election campaign was run by the same racketeers. George W. was transformed from a conservative who was compassionate to a commander in chief who was unflappable. John Kerry was accused of the unmanly crime of nuance and caricatured as flip-floppable.

We were subjected to an endless strongman debate with Arnold Schwarzenegger leading the attack on “girlie men.”

Snip...

There’s something to be learned in the Bush debacle. Beware the call of the old manliness. Beware the man who ramps up the danger and offers himself as hero and security blanket. And beware the leader whose unwavering, unflappable, unnuanced and unjustified confidence in the face of risk becomes our disaster.

http://www.qctimes.net/articles/2006/04/14/opinion/opinion/doc443f18f0a45f9118592868.txt

[TallahasseeGrannie]

1. Just watch the Sopranos.

[Clark2008]

3. Hee hee - you added a walker to your Tyrana-Grannie

:hi:

[TallahasseeGrannie]

4. Yep!

[blondeatlast]

2. Goodman missed one point regarding the "protection racket"

theme--beware the man who offers to protect you, but has no experience whatsoever with risk.

Otherwise she nailed it--and the whole article is worth a read.

[politicaholic]

5. I was always more afraid of Bush than the terrorists...

I was aware of him when he went into that disgracful campaign of lies against Anne Richards to become governor. Nobody in republican party questioned why they were supposed to vote for a failed businessman with a lackluster education who is a religious fanatic.

If I wanted a president like that I would vote for my step cousin, a laid-off carpenter evangelical who's taking on-line classes for "management". He's an asshole so management should be perfect for him.