President of 8th Grade

[Manix]

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Three Years After Sept. 11, Republicans Are Running Against 'Girlie-Men'

By MATT WELCH

National Post, September 11, 2004

NEW YORK -- NEW YORK -- "To those critics who are so pessimistic about our economy," California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger told the Republican National Convention and a small national television audience in Madison Square Garden, "I say: 'Don't be economic girlie men!'"

It was an iconic moment in a week when the Grand Old Party expertly positioned itself as the most likely to win a popularity contest in a junior high school locker room. The girlie-men Democrats were taunted for lacking "backbone," mocked as being too "sensitive" and "fainthearted," and lumped with the 200,000 misfit "nose-rings and tattoos" (in the words of one Illinois delegate) protesting outside.

This essentially schoolyard message -- often delivered by charismatic, manly optimists such as Schwarzenegger, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and Arizona Senator John McCain -- had the impressive strategic effect of placing Democrats squarely on the defensive and making it seem as if they can't take a good-natured joke, even when they were merely correcting the most obvious ill-natured lies.


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I experienced a comical burst of locker-room invective when I mentioned on the convention Web site for the libertarian magazine Reason that the just-finished Zell Miller rant -- which, among other illiberal flourishes, spoke fondly of those glory days when "all private plans, all private lives, have been in a sense repealed by an overriding public danger" -- was "the most frightening political speech I had ever seen in my life" (meant in terms of what the country I love could become).

Commenters to Reason's Web site channelled my old 8th grade tormenter Kenny Hira, though far less effectively than he, calling me (surprise!) a "girlie-man," a "little baby," suggesting that I had my "arms wrapp around your knees, pissing in your little shorts," warning me to "figure out which side you are on," and so on. A half-dozen different people used some variation on the word "pussy."



Matt Welch

[Catfight]

1. Arnold should be shipped back to Germany. n/t

[pfitz59]

2. Uhh....he's Austrian....dude....