[Dialogue] An opinion on difference between DEMS and PUGS

opossum2@att.net opossum2 at att.net
Thu Jul 29 19:51:42 EDT 2004


Dear Doris and Charles,

Great article.  Also, with regard to the comment of things having been like this since "the Nixon Administration", let us not forget that Nixon first won political office in California in the '40s by beating out Helen Gehegan Douglas for a seat in Congress by painting her as a Red who was, as the famous quote from his campaign literature goes: "Pink right down to her underwear!"  Her husband, the actor Melvyn Douglas, to his dying day referred to Nixon as "that dirty, cowardly little man".


-------------- Original message from Charles or Doris Hahn : -------------- 

> This is from www.mahablog.com 
> 
> 
> Wednesday, July 28, 2004 
> No Fear 
> 
> To see the fundamental difference between the Dems and 
> the Pugs, just look at Teresa Heinz Kerry and Laura 
> Welch Bush. 
> 
> Teresa Kerry is real. She will be who she is -- 
> multifaceted, refined yet earthy, cerebral and 
> sensual, focused and passionate. Even as she plays the 
> role of supportive spouse, she does it her way -- she 
> spoke last night of her own experiences, making it 
> clear she has her own identity and is not just the 
> woman's auxiliary of John Kerry. 
> 
> And then there's Laura Bush. I do not dislike Laura. 
> She's an attractive and gracious woman. However, she 
> seems ... artificial. I suspect when she's off camera 
> Karl Rove pulls her battery pack and tucks her away in 
> a pink satin box. 
> 
> The Hard Right is tooling up to demonize Teresa the 
> way they demonized Hillary. And why do they hate 
> Hillary? They're afraid of her. 
> 
> I watched a bit of the "Chris Matthews Show" this 
> weekend. Matthews and his panel of "pundits" could 
> think of nothing else to talk about than how Hillary 
> is playing the Democrats to get herself elected 
> president. The theory is that Hillary the Ambitious, 
> Hillary the Schemer, would rather Kerry lost in 
> November so she can get the nomination in 2008. 
> 
> I bet Matthews has nightmares about Hillary hiding 
> under his bed, waiting to rip his heart out of his 
> chest and eat it. 
> 
> The Republicans are playing to the emotions of white 
> men who resent losing their place in the center of a 
> patriarchal universe. They've been doing this since 
> the Nixon Administration, and they get better and 
> better at it. And by now we've got a whole generation 
> of white guys who grew up believing some snotty 
> liberal elitist feminazis are out to castrate them. 
> 
> I know I've sung this song before, but it's an 
> important point. I think misfiring masculinity may be 
> the root of all political evil in this country. See, 
> for example, the way Norman Mailer linked Fear of the 
> Female to support for the war in Iraq. 
> 
> As sociologist Arlie Hochschild wrote in "Let Them Eat 
> War": 
> Let's begin by re-imagining the blue-collar man, for 
> we do not normally think of him as a fearful man. ... 
> Since the l970s, the blue-collar man has taken a lot 
> of economic hits. The buying power of his paycheck, 
> the size of his benefits, the security of his job -- 
> all these have diminished. ... For anyone who stakes 
> his pride on earning an honest day's pay, this 
> economic fall is, unsurprisingly enough, hard to bear. 
> How, then, do these blue-collar men feel about it? Ed 
> Landry said he felt "numb." Others are anxious, 
> humiliated and, as who wouldn't be, fearful. But in 
> cultural terms, Nascar Dad isn't supposed to feel 
> afraid. What he can feel though is angry. As Susan 
> Faludi has described so well in her book Stiffed, that 
> is what many such men feel. As a friend who works in a 
> Maine lumber mill among blue-collar Republicans 
> explained about his co-workers, "They felt that 
> everyone else -- women, kids, minorities -- were all 
> moving up, and they felt like they were moving down. 
> Even the spotted owl seemed like it was on its way up, 
> while he and his job, were on the way down. And he's 
> angry." 
> A wise person I know once said, "everything you feed 
> will grow." And Republicans have been feeding the 
> resentment felt by working-class white men for nearly 
> forty or so years. GOP surrogates like Rush Limbaugh 
> and Bill O'Reilly keep it stoked. Had it not been fed 
> it might be dead by now. In the past forty years white 
> guys might have gotten over their resentment and 
> accepted a more egalitarian world. But it was fed, and 
> now it's huge and impenetrable. And George Bush is 
> playing to it to the hilt, because it's all he's got. 
> 
> 
> Back to Laura Bush -- the connection between 
> subservient wives and "regular guy" status discussed 
> nicely in this Buzzflash interview with the 
> above-mentioned Arlie Hothschild. 
> Buzzflash: ... Bush can't communicate directly to the 
> white male about how he stands for the white male 
> being on top, so there's a lot of coding going on, it 
> seems. And much of this is subliminal, because Bush 
> can't say, well, I keep Laura in her place, but -- 
> Hochschild: You never see her. She's in a lockbox. 
> BuzzFlash: And she's always walking behind him and is 
> carefully scripted to say as little as possible. If 
> she says anything, it's once or twice a month, and 
> it's a sentence or two, or maybe a highly controlled 
> interview. In their relationship, she symbolizes the 
> woman who is always deferential to the husband. ... 
> He's picking their pockets but saying to them -- with 
> a wink and a nod, in politically correct code words 
> and symbols -- like that all-male signing of the 
> late-term abortion bill, where only white males were 
> present -- the white guys are in charge here. "Notice 
> there's no women," Bush is coding to them. "We're 
> reigning them in, but not officially -- we're going to 
> say we're all for women." 
> And then a wink, a wink and a nod. 
> This National Review Online article describes Laura 
> Bush as an ideal First Lady: "She is poised, 
> well-read, low-key, and rarely discusses controversial 
> issues in depth [i.e., she keeps her mouth shut and 
> knows her place -- maha] She seems to believe her 
> husband was elected and that, as First Lady, she is 
> there to support him. ... We are comfortable with 
> Laura Bush. A former teacher, she is non-threatening, 
> classy, and devoted to mother-and-apple-pie issues 
> like literacy and schools. She is easy to interview 
> but journalists are not going to hear her spouting off 
> about how much she has come to dislike Democratic 
> spin, even if she does." [emphasis added] 
> The author, Sheri Annis, describes Teresa Heinz Kerry 
> as "refreshing." But clearly, she finds THK a little 
> disturbing and possibly a freak:. "She does not stick 
> to the talking points. In fact, Heinz Kerry described 
> Republican charges about her and her husband as 
> un-American during the couple's joint 60 Minutes 
> appearance. Such heated rhetoric is no way to win over 
> swing voters... Teresa Heinz Kerry didn't land on the 
> cover of Newsweek because she's a strong, independent 
> woman, but because she's viewed as quirky." 
> Um, how many years has it been since Betty Friedan 
> wrote The Feminine Mystique? (Forty-one, I believe.) 
> In 1973 I had a summer job working for the PR 
> department of the Missouri State Fair. One of my 
> duties was to write stories for home-town papers about 
> the winners of livestock shows. So I spent a couple of 
> weeks attending cattle competitions. 
> The dairy cattle judges said something peculiar 
> whenever they gave a prize to a cow; something like, 
> "I like this here cow 'cause she's got a good udder on 
> her and good femininity." This seemed more like Miss 
> America than Best 2-Year-Old Holstein. 
> So finally I asked one of the judges what he meant by 
> "good femininity." He looked bemused. It means, he 
> said, that she stays out in the pasture an' chews her 
> cud and don't cause no trouble. 
> The difference between the Dems and the Pugs is that 
> Dems aren't afraid of women who cause trouble. Dems 
> seem to enjoy trouble-causing women, in fact. 
> But Pugs are afraid of them. Pugs prefer Holsteins to 
> human women. This is why Pugs are weenies. 
> 
> 
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