If it won't let you view it, just watch the ad, it takes like 2 seconds ...
Excerpt:
Cue absurd picture of Bush as a ridiculously muscular Uncle Sam type character.Coulter insisted last night that she did not intend the remark as an anti-gay slur -- that she did not intend to suggest that John Edwards, husband and father, was gay -- but instead only used the word as a "schoolyard taunt," to call him a sissy. And that is true. Her aim was not to suggest that Edwards is actually gay, but simply to feminize him like they do with all male Democratic or liberal political leaders.
For multiple reasons, nobody does that more effectively or audaciously than Coulter, which is why they need her so desperately and will never jettison her. How could they possibly shun her for engaging in tactics on which their entire movement depends? They cannot, which is why they are not and will not.
The converse of this is equally true. As critical as it is to them to feminize Democratic and liberal males (and to masculinize the women), even more important is to create false images of masculine power and strength around their authority figures. The reality of this masculine power is almost always non-existent. The imagery is what counts.
This works exactly the same as the images of moral purity that they work so hard to manufacture, whereby the leaders they embrace -- such as Gingrich, Limbaugh, Bill Bennett, even the divorced and estranged-from-his-children Ronald Reagan and Coulter herself -- are plauged by the most morally depraved and reckless personal lives, yet still parade around as the heroes of the "Values Voters." Just as what matters is that their leaders prance around as moral leaders (even while deviating as far as they want from those standards), what matters to them also is that their leaders play-act as strong and masculine figures, even when there is no basis, no reality, to the play-acting.
Ronald Reagan never got anywhere near the military war (claiming eyesight difficulties to avoid deployment in World War II), and he spent his life as a Hollywood actor, not a rancher, yet to this day, conservatives swoon over his masculine role-playing as though he is some sort of super-brave military hero. Meanwhile, Jimmy Carter, who actually graduated the Naval Academy and was assigned to real live nuclear submarines, is mocked as a weak and snivelling coward who should not have a ship named after him.
And the ultimate expression of faux, empty, masculine courage and power is, of course, the Commander-in-Chief himself -- the Glorious Leader whom John Podhoretz hailed in the title of his worshippful cult book as The First Great Leader of the 21st Century -- with the ranch hats and brush-clearing pants and flight-suit outfits that would make the Village People seethe with jealousy over his costume choices. Just behold this poster which was a much in-demand item at past CPAC events (h/t Digby), which makes as clear as can be how these Bush followers have tried to idolize their Leader:
That laughable absurdity really reveals the heart of this movement. It is a cult of contrived masculinity whereby people dress up as male archtypes like cowboys, ranchers, and tough guys even though they are nothing of the kind -- or prance around as Churchillian warriors because they write from a safe and protected distance about how great war is -- and in the process become triumphant heroes and masculine powerful icons and strong leaders. They and their followers triumph over the weak, effete, humiliated Enemy, and thereby become powerful and exceptional and safe.
The second-most astonishing political fact over the last six years -- after the permanently jaw-dropping and incomparably disgraceful fact that 70% of Americans believed as late as September, 2003 (6 months after the invasion) that Saddam Hussein personally participated in the planning of the 9/11 attacks (a fact which, by itself, profoundly indicts all of our political and media instititutions at once) -- is that the 2004 presidential candidate who actually volunteered to fight, in actual combat, in the Vietnam jungle was the one depicted as the weak subversive coward, while the candidate who used every family connection possible to avoid ever fighting was depicted as the brave, masculine, fighter-warrior who had the backbone to stand down the Evil Enemies and protect us all.
That is why so many of them who have never been anywhere near the military -- and will never go near it even as their wars are endangered by a lack of volunteers -- have a monomanical obsession with military glory, with contant displays of how "resolute" and "courageous" they are, with notions of forced "submission" and "humiliation" of their opponents (just take notice of how central a role those concepts play in neoconservative "arguments"), and with depicting those who oppose the wars they cheer on as "cowards" (even when the cowards in question are decorated Marines with 30 years of service).
-- Asuka
) but what of my Conservative kindred spirits? For all I know, they're kicking back, smoking a pipe and toeing the tough-guy Party line. 
