The Discerning Texan

GETTING IT BACKWARDS, AS USUAL: I don't pay much attention, generally, but I'm stuck in a car with nothing but Technorati for company, and noticed that in one of his typically verbose efforts, Glenn Greenwald gets around, eventually, to making two points, One is that I'm a geek, whose interest in Western culture's retreat from traditional ideas of masculinity is thus silly:

Glenn Reynolds -- who, by his own daily admission, devotes his life to attending convention center conferences on space and playing around with new, cool gadgets in the fun room in his house, like a sheltered adolescent in his secret treehouse club -- to fret: "Are we turning into a nation of wimps?"

But, see, that's the point. I'm a geek. If I notice it, it's probably real. It would be like Greenwald complaining that the country was going overboard in hatred of Bush.

There are few things more disorienting than listening to Rush Limbaugh declare himself the icon of machismo and masculinity and mock others as "wimps." And if you look at those who have this obsession -- the Chris Matthews and Glenn Reynolds and Jonah Goldbergs and Victor Davis Hansons -- what one finds in almost every case is that those who want to convert our political process and especially our national policies into a means of proving one's "traditional masculine virtues" -- the physically courageous warriors unbound by effete conventions -- themselves could not be further removed from those attributes, and have lives which are entirely devoid of such "virtues."

Let's translate that last paragraph from Glennwaldese to plain English: No, you guys are wimps.

Althouse wonders (but not in the obvious context),

Do women not exist in Glenn G's world?

Must... resist... the low road.

Eh, what the hell. Dance with the girl that brung ya and all that. Since it's the low road that Greenwald himself stamps down every day, here it is:

I really think that questioning others' masculinity is a game probably better left to people who haven't had more cock in and out of them than a Tyson Chicken regional distribution center.

I'm sorry, was that not turgid enough for Greenwald? Let me try to translate that for Gleen in his native tongue:

This dynamic of a decidedly effeminate man accusing his rivals of being insufficiently manly, and indeed homoerotically longing to be dominated by men with such virtues, is depressingly pervasive, yet incomparably significant.

Not that I'm saying homosexuality is incompatible with masculinity, of course. Consenting biweekly to having one's duodenum battered with the manic hydraulic fury of a tricked-out V-12 jackhammer manned by an epileptic Con-Ed worker with an ancestral oath of vengeance against asphalt would, I think, tend to butch one up, at least as regards one's pain threshold.

But let's break down Greenwald:

1: Praising masculine virtues and denigrating the female virtues is a singular element of fascism;

but

2: My political opponents are mincing fairyboys and you shouldn't believe what they write because they're sissified shemales who lust for the protective embrace of big, strong arms to wrap around them and hold them tight.

Let us combine these two:

3: Glenn Greenwald is a closet fascist, like his heroes before him, such as, oh let's just throw out a name here, Roy Cohn.

Heh. (note to Glenn: speaking as someone who has benefitted from one of your one-word "Heh" posts--those are absolute gold when it comes to number of generated hits. It is truly an amazing phenomenon how powerful one word can be when issued by the right person... sort of reminds me of that Who song "Pure and Easy"...)

Also, great awe and respect is due to Ace here: it is not often that I LMFA!O when reading the news; I burst out so loud, my wife thought I had sat on something. And backtracking to Glenn's headline "Getting it backwards, as usual" brought some laughter as well... Thanks, guys for making my day.

Labels: Blogging, Nutroots, The Left