Frank Rich brings up sock-gate! and AWOL!

[mumon]

http://www.iht.com/articles/537190.html

Granted, it's in the International Herald Tribune, but still, it's cool...

But with the high stakes of an election at hand, it's not enough to stuff socks in the president's flight suit. Kerry must be turned into a girl. Such castration warfare has long been a Republican staple. We've had Bill Clinton vilified as the stooge of a harridan wife and Al Gore as the puppet of the makeover artist Naomi Wolf...


But there was still this Vietnam problem. One guy went there, one may have gone AWOL. Enter Karen Hughes. Having helped fictionalize Bush's wartime years, she now resurfaced to undermine Kerry's, using her April book tour (for her memoir "Ten Minutes From Normal") to introduce NEW YORK Only in an election year ruled by fiction could a sissy who used Daddy's connections to escape Vietnam turn an actual war hero into a girlie-man.
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But with the high stakes of an election at hand, it's not enough to stuff socks in the president's flight suit. Kerry must be turned into a girl. Such castration warfare has long been a Republican staple. We've had Bill Clinton vilified as the stooge of a harridan wife and Al Gore as the puppet of the makeover artist Naomi Wolf. But given his actual history on the field of battle, this year's Democratic standard bearer would, seemingly, be immune to such attacks, especially from the camp of a candidate whose most daring feat of physical courage was tearing down the Princeton goalposts.
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The truth is that Kerry was a man's man not just when he volunteered to fight in a losing war but when he came home and forthrightly fought against it, on grounds that history has upheld. Unless he's man enough to stand up for that past, he's doomed to keep competing with Bush to see who can best play an action figure on television. Kerry doesn't seem to understand that it takes a certain kind of talent to play dress-up and deliver lines like "Bring it on." In that race, it's not necessarily the best man but the best actor who will win.
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The New York Times