Sweetness And Light

by digby

Jonathan Schwartz has unearthed yet another example of “War For Oil” Republicans:

Now that we know George Bush and Karl Rove recently spent 45 minutes listening to Norman Podhoretz’s views on Iran (kill! kill! kill!), it’s worthwhile to remember this May 21, 2004 statement by Podhoretz’s wife, author Midge Decter:

We’re not in the middle east to bring sweetness and light to the whole world. That’s nonsense. We’re in the middle east because we and our European friends and our European non-friends depend on something that comes from the middle east, namely oil.

(You can listen to it yourself here at 35:55. Decter was appearing on KCRW’s show To the Point.) Bush gave Podhoretz the nation’s highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 2004. And he hired Elliot Abrams, Iran-contra criminal and Podhoretz and Decter’s son-in-law, for his National Security Council staff. (Delightfully, Abrams’ title is “Deputy National Security Adviser for Global Democracy Strategy.” I understand the position was originally called Deputy National Security Adviser for Sweetness and Light.) So Bush really digs this family. How strange that he loves hanging around with a clan whose matriarch he disagrees with so fundamentally.

But never say Bush doesn’t love a codpiece. I believe that her paean to Donald Rumsfeld’s manly bulges will stand as the single most sycophantic work of Bushian fangirl fiction (and believe me the competition for that honor is …erm … stiff.)

Here’s a little excerpt:

Men are likely to say they admire the way he knows his mind and talks tough or straight, or the way he managed so deftly to keep the press in its place, or, in the more general terms, what he has done and is doing for the country. Women, on the other hand tend to express their feelings about him less specifically, saying that they find him to be a particularly attractive combination of good-looking and smart and sexy. Both descriptions, however, can basically be summed up in a word that has for a considerable period of time been deprived of public legitimacy.

The word is manliness.

… [B]y the time he departed the White House there were few women and even fewer men who would with any sincerity have awarded Clinton the status of sex-hero, let alone — O happy invention! — “studmuffin.” That designation would have to await the arrival of a high-achieving, clear-headed, earnest, no-nonsense, Midwestern family man nearly seventy years old.

The times, in other words, they were a-changin’.

It’s true that the entire country did go mad for a time. But the Rummy the “Studmuffin” movement was pretty much limited to the Village press and Decter and her fellow oil-for-war Republicans, who apparently find a rambling, sadistic, nutbag septuagenarian hotter than hot. If that were something that a massive number of women find attractive, McCain would be winning in a landslide.

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