Perhaps it's the "gateway drug" of this campaign season. That, and the "Factor of Color." Because since Edwards stepped away, that's waht we've got. Either we give the country the First Black President or the First Woman President.
In the mindset of those who somehow still aren't ready (because maybe they still think the Dark Ages were the gold ol' days - I myself have encountered more that a few of 'em who think the country began its decline the moment women got the right to vote), well, that's what we have to deal with. I was reading a Michael Moore commentary - written in early January while Edwards was still viable. And he surmised, correctly I think, that Hillary voted for the IWR and all subsequent funding (and Barack went for all the funding, too) because of the "Estrogen Factor."
(snip)
I wasn't "misled," and millions of others who took to the
streets in February of 2003 weren't "misled" either. It was simply
amazing that we knew the war was wrong when none of us had been briefed
by the CIA, none of us were national security experts, and none of us
had gone on a weapons inspection tour of Iraq. And yet... we knew we
were being lied to! Let me ask those of you reading this letter: Were
YOU "misled" -- or did you figure it out sometime between October of
2002 and March of 2007 that George W. Bush was up to something rotten?
Twenty-three other senators were smart enough to figure it out and vote
against the war from the get-go. Why wasn't Senator Clinton?
I have a theory: Hillary knows the sexist country we still live in and
that one of the reasons the public, in the past, would never consider a
woman as president is because she would also be commander in chief. The
majority of Americans were concerned that a woman would not be as likely
to go to war as a man (horror of horrors!). So, in order to placate that
mindset, perhaps she believed she had to be as "tough" as a man, she had
to be willing to push The Button if necessary, and give the generals
whatever they wanted. If this is, in fact, what has motivated her
pro-war votes, then this would truly make her a scary first-term
president. If the U.S. is faced with some unforeseen threat in her first
years, she knows that in order to get re-elected she'd better be ready
to go all Maggie Thatcher on whoever sneezes in our direction. Do we
want to risk this, hoping the world makes it in one piece to her second
term?
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/message/index.php?messageDate=2008-01-02I think he's correct. She felt she had to "out-tough" or "out-balls" the Testosterone Team - those (mainly) men, mostly among the Dark Siders, who think all we need is more hitting, more bombing, more shooting, more fighting, more explosions, more destruction, more tough, more cowboy, more guns, more ammo, more therefore of everything that's gotten us into such trouble, made us so many more enemies, cost us the trust and admiration of the world, earned us more distrust and return-hostility and even a slow but steady march toward a new Cold War. Why do we see Vladimir Putin and others talking about arming up again? Because they see a threat - mainly from us. The bad guys appear to think that if only we could just come up with the hardest punch in the nose, that'd somehow magically bully the last of the adversaries into submission and they'd go away and see the error of their ways and start behaving themselves and everything would be just peachy again. In other words, we've gone the rogue-aggressor route, sticking guns in everybody's faces, with this my-way-or-the-highway shit (comply or we'll blow you to smithereens), and done it their way, AND LOOK WHERE WE ARE!!!
Perhaps Hillary has been trying to redefine the whole "Estrogen Factor" concept to fit that old paradigm - that so tragically and disastrously isn't working, to make herself palatable, and not summarily ruled out, by the knuckledragger contingent. Well, that's one way to deal with them. Perhaps a simplistic way.
My son and I had to drive from L.A. to Camarillo today and as he's trying to rack up hours behind the wheel with his learner's permit, I was in the passenger seat. And I had a lot of time to think.
So if calimary was president, what would she do? I think I'd put a different sort of "Estrogen Factor" to work.
Who would I be dealing with, as president? A lot of bigshots who are mostly men, aside from Germany's Angela Merkel, internationally, and domestically, there's really nobody - the best the other side can offer is a handful of screeching harpies from hate radio, contradicta, and the pathetically insignificant and nearly invisible liddy dole. So we're dealing with mostly men, okay? Both foreign and domestic.
So I'd use the best weapon we've got: How To Handle A Dick (because a dick is, in many respects, just a handle).
So there I was in the passenger seat, thinking up how many of the sexiest, most alluring women in America I could round up as "MY Spice Girls for Peace and Freedom and The American Way." Just work with me here. Angelina Jolie. Tyra Banks. Oprah (a MOST beautiful and alluring and elegant and glamorous woman - over 50). Amber Valletta and Shalom Harlow and the supermodel contingent. Beyonce Knowles. Jennifer Garner. Jessica Biel. Scarlett Johanssen. Carrie Underwood. Faith Hill. Ellen Barkin. You get my drift. Like I said - JUST WORK WITH ME HERE FOR A MINUTE. And I'd call them all into my Oval Office, explain the strategy to them, and put them to work, domestically and internationally, to sweetly beguile (NOT TO BED) our male adversaries and unruly partners, playing to and exploiting their basic male weakness. And I'd continue to recruit more. I mean, look who we had tracking WMDs in some really dicey parts of the world? A BABE - Valerie Plame. I met some political activists at a dinner at which she was guest of honor, and one of them had family members in the CIA and said this was Standard Operating Procedure there - recruiting alluring women to go overseas and deal with some of these testosterone-issue jerks. And the blonder the better, I was told. Blinded by "love" and all that. Mind you it never included any disrobing or that sort of stuff. It was all done in the boardrooms not the bedrooms. It was psy-ops. Playing to and manipulating the greatest and deepest inner hang-ups of the enemy.
Sexist? Yeeeeeeeeeeahhh, likely. But just wait a minute. What I would be doing is co-opting the roger ailes view - and an idea that sprouted from reading a blog by Dan Cooper - who once helped design Pox Noise:
(snip)
The best thing that ever happened to Roger Ailes was 9/11. Even Roger Ailes,
Machiavellian as he was, couldn't have dreamed up anybody as fabulous as Usama
bin Laden (Allah told Roger to spell it Usama), or UBL, as Fox News called him.
Because somebody up there, or down there, loved Roger, 9/11 happened on his
watch. It gave him the opportunity to throw gasoline on the bonfire he had
already set to scorch and destroy traditional liberal values. For those of you
under 50, the United States once had liberal values. There was even such a
thing as liberal Republicans. That's enough of that, because I know talking
about the Devil's spawn and blond big-boobed temptresses is far more
interesting. But hang on a bit.
While I was working in Los Angeles, early in the Fox-hyped action adventure
America called the War in Iraq, and my marriage was going nuclear, the number
of viewers of the newly American flag-bedecked, happily neoconservative Fox
News Channel jumped 300%. By now, the Fox News headline readers were all-
American cheerleader types (blonds with big boobs!), and I always imagined them
standing on each other's shoulders during station breaks cheering on the troops
and our glorious Commander-in-Chief.
http://www.caos.us/2008/01/naked-launch-prologue.htmlThe reason I mentioned all those alluring females above was that the way to get to the mentality that watches Pox Noise and worships the cardboard cowboy and still believes he can do no wrong is to hijack the base mentality of message delivery that roger ailes used: he aimed straight for the dick. Because, I believe, THAT'S WHERE HE COMES FROM AND THAT'S WHAT HE OPERATES FROM. The dick. For him, ugly, fat, old Jabba-the-Hutt type, it's basically about being the biggest, most potent dick around, 'cause that's how you get everything everywhere, including babes. You assert your dominance and your potency and your power by being the biggest, baddest he-man in the jungle. You're operating straight from below the belt - your own personal Missile of Muscle! Because that's all you're about - muscle. And it's probably because you're so fuckin' ugly inside and out that the only way you can intimidate everybody else and still be attractive to women (the ultimate trapping of power - SEX) is through power.
I had a dad like that. NOTHING to look at, but he was a skillful salesman and was able to project an image of power, success and wealth, and he had hot-and-cold bimbos up the yingyang, much to the distress of my poor mother. And the babes flocked to him, even though he kinda looked like roger ailes, because of what they saw in him that he could deliver for them: power and influence (even though, in the real, non-illusionary world, he didn't have that much of either.
That's where the beautiful women come in. Instead of bombs, WE fight with bombshells. The way I believe Queen Esther did in the Old Testament, using her beauty and sexual allure and her wiles to ensnare the King of Persia and wrap him around her little finger, save her people, and save her adoptive father Mordechai from execution by his enemies. If I, as president, knew I had to disarm somebody like roger ailes (and if you read that Naked Launch prologue about how he want about using Pox Noise to demonize all things Democratic and liberal, VISCERALLY, from the gut - AND BELOW), all the women he had on there looked like frickin' inflatable dolls. Big fat juicy lips, lovely faces, more often blonde than anything other, and as alluring as hell. So there we see roger's Achilles Heel, don't we?
:evilgrin:
And if roger ailes can deal in that kind of mind-fucking and manipulation, he can certainly be affected by it. He knows how he feels, and what rings his chimes, and that's what he put to use to "get" everybody else who resonated with him - all those poor, pathetic Dark Siders who think the dick rules all, it's all about the stern, punishing father, the guns-NOT-butter, the testosterone thing, the shoot-first-ask-questions-later, diplomacy is for sissies crap. It's all about the dick. So the "Estrogen Factor" would very wisely exploit that weakness. After all, we've learned the valuable strategic war-making lesson from kkkarl rove about attacking the enemy at his strongest point. Which for most of these guys is their virility, their sense of their own balls, their masculinity and potency. I mean, look at that clown who's now "running" France, Nicolas Sarkozy - hardliner, wrong-winger, and being led around by his balls. He's just thrown over his contrarian independent wife for ex-supermodel Carla Bruni who's best known for frollicking in the near-nude with Mick Jagger while Jerry Hall sat home and got pissed off.
It's not so much the "Estrogen Factor" as it is the "Dick Factor." And how you - er - um - handle it. Psychology and wartime psy-ops. THEY play it on the Dark Side. For all they're worth. WE have an opportunity to play it BETTER. And Obama could do his own version of it if he understands the underlying "Dick Factor" and works it. It need not be only Hillary's bailiwick.
I must admit here, it betrays in me sort of a disdain (yeah, okay, pity, too) for these pathetic simplistic assholes who can only really speak in testosterone. You see 'em on parade with every republi-CON debate and gathering et al. It's all about THE DICK and whose is the biggest. All mccain and romney and gomer and rudy and even numbskulls like tancredo and duncan hunter were about was dueling dicks. Quien es mas macho. Who doesn't give a damn about walking softly but cares EVERYTHING about carrying that all-hallowed big stick - AND swinging it around as threateningly and intimidatingly as possible. All they can think about is who's on top (because of being perceived as having the biggest dick. They're nothing but a whole mess of little boys trying to prove they're bigger-n you. Which, to me, amateur psychologist that I flatter myself as being, betrays in THEM, a basic insecurity about their own manhood and potency and how they CLEARLY feel they have something to prove. Then, of course, we have romney with five sons, NONE OF WHOM seems "macho" enough according to the paradigm of that side of the aisle to enlist in the military. And romney's purported "strength" is economic, not macho military war-hero or war-hero wannabe like the rest of 'em. You can tell romney's never gotten his hands dirty - but does do a lot of that fancy hair stuff (and they put Edwards down for 400-dollar haircuts and called him the "Breck girl"! I wonder how much time and money romney has spent on HIS hair - probably has his nails buffed every week, too). Remember one of the bad guys' favorite insults flung at our side in 2004 - from none other than Mr. Testosterone-Gone-Wrong, Arnold the Gropenator - the "economic girlie men." See where they're going?
I mean, if you really wanna get barbaric and sexist about it (and I think we have to take that kind of thing into account, when we look at who we're really up against, the mindset, the pathology, going into the G.E.), look at the two biggest "macho men" they've got: bush and cheney. Notice how they don't have sons? And for cheney, the personal conflict is even more cutting because one of his two daughters is gay. Imagine how THAT must mess with his head! For many men (and we've got a neighbor like that), it's all about proving your virility because you can seed sons. Patriarchal society and all that. And this one particular neighbor who had three daughters suddenly became hostile and a little condescending to my husband when our second child turned out to be a boy (our daughter was the best friend of his youngest daughter and therefore we inter-acted frequently). And this neighbor was, coincidentally, a staunch republi-CON. Looks down on us as being the crazy loony-liberal hippies in the neighborhood to this day. And I have always suspected that he has a big inner hangup about his own masculinity and potency and virility because he was unable to sire sons. My late and much-loved father-in-law sired three sons, and had this SERIOUS undercurrent of macho all the time. Hell, even their dogs were male. No wonder my poor mother-in-law drank! I observed with interest the change in him - and in the overall "vibe" of the family that he undisputedly led, that came when more women entered the family (through marriage - his sons started doing surprising things like bringing him daughters-in-law). It was a FASCINATING and most instructive character study as he softened, the hard edges seemed to have been sanded down, and it wasn't this domineering testosterone thing anymore. Things seriously and genuinely transformed into something (pardon the expression) kinder and gentler. It was, all told, a rather lovely and welcome transformation through that side of the family when the "Estrogen Factor" started taking over.
Myself, personally, I don't care about having sons versus having daughters. They're of equal worth and value and preciousness. I would regard my husband as equally virile if he'd given me daughters only. Or, for that matter, if he shot blanks and we had no kids. It wouldn't have mattered. It just isn't a factor for me. But face it: to many others, it IS. Many of them are SERIOUSLY hung-up on this kind of thing. And we find a vast majority of them on the other side.
Anyway, that's just what I've been thinking as I try to connect the dots and figure people out, what makes them tick. I think we HAVE to do that - the figuring people out part - with the enemy we face (either the politicians or the communications/message specialists on the Dark Side - adversaries ALL). We have to look at what moves and motivates them deep down, their complexes and insecurities and hang-ups and obsessions, so we can attack THAT. Their biggest weaknesses and complexes and fears. Just fodder to be exploited, in my view. The better we understand thos undercurrents, the easier we'll beat them.
Shit - sorry this went on so long... what the hell do I know?
on edit - YIKES! This is REALLY long! Sorry about that!!!
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