Re: eek!

On Tue, Nov 27, 2001 at 12:50:50AM -0500, Bijan Parsia muttered something about:
> > Heh, no followup? No nail-biting Presidential decision as to which bed Bush
> > took his blind wife back to? :<
> 
> Is this the article that puts this in the same breath as "Saddam is evil"?

Yes. Irony unbound.

> > All of this seems somehow to have the Clintons -- and the right wing's "he's
> > a philanderer, she's a half-lesbo" fantasies -- as a subtext.
> 
> But in a good way or a bad way? I.e., is it "oh look, bush is
> wholesome" or is it "yeek! what a loser!"?

Well, strictly speaking, since this is a UK paper, I suspect it's in large
measure Brits laughing at Bush, and for good reason.

But however it's intended by Brit media, the point of leaking it and the way
it plays *here* are likely to be different.

The state (as measured in right wing, misogynist terms) of the Clinton
marriage was right-wing fodder from the '91 campaign season until, well, I
guess it may stop being talked about if or when both of them are out of
public life, if even then. (It seemed to flair up rather a lot after he was
lame duck and even out of office given their separate living arrangements,
the presence of a bedroom in the presidential library plans, his, iirc,
Manhattan apartment, and so on.) From Limbaugh to the Nat'l Rev to Fox News,
I remember dozens and dozens of sly and gross speculations about their
sexual estrangement, much of which I take to have been chiding Clinton for
letting Hillary off, so to speak, the hook; that is, somehow his not fucking
her regularly was the cause of her *obviously inappropriate* policy
meddlings. I think I recall Limbaugh suggesting this explicitly during the
health care thing, early on. This is also part of the right-wing sneering
comparison of Hillary to Eleanor Roosevelt, which it certainly intended as a
slander. And you know what they think about Eleanor; see what happens when a
president doesn't "take care of business"? We end up with communist plots
like the UDHR.

One of the motivations for all the early and continued talk about Laura Bush
being "traditional" and non-Hillaryesque is surely about placating this
right-wing fantasy that a President should be male and well-serviced.  I
think part of the message about Bush's domesticity is that he's both, and
that he and the country are all better off for it.

Of course maybe I've just gotten a bit carried away, but there is something
overdetermined about the way the public (and so exceedingly political)
representation of Bush relationship is managed and cared for.

And irony yet abounds. The least insane version of the right's carping about
Bill and Hillary is that they politicized the personal, that they used
personal stuff for political advantage, and that they did so willy-nilly;
still a fairly stupid complaint, but probably the least crazed. The Bush's
do precisely the same thing only their domestic politics are a comfort to
the right's misogyny in a way that the Clintons's was a threat. (Pretty good
indication of the vehemence with which the right insists upon this fantasy
is to be found in the degree to which they took the *Clintons* as a threat
to it.)

> Hmm. "Bush likes to go to bed early for manly seed dispensing" is an
> interpretation i hadn't considered...and there's early so he can still get
> to bed early vs. early so he has lots of sex early. Yeach.

Post-9-11 Bush's handlers seem esp. desperate to portray him as "ordinarily
tough"; i.e., a regular, but tough guy, i.e., a firefighter; someone who
could easily have said "let's roll" for real, had he had the chance (which
of course he did re: Vietnam and he spent the whole time partying in
Houston). I think this notion that he's not out hanging with Hollywood
types, that he runs religiously, that he goes to bed early, that his wife is
properly subordinate to him, that he's "conquered his destructive
appetities" (i.e., gave up alcohol definitively), and all the rest started
out explicitly as making him out to be the anti-Clinton and now is being
tweaked to make him seem "regular" and "tough" and "manly" and "one with
whom you should not trifle" and the like.

channeling-Gore-Vidal-ly y'rs, Kendall