WTF Is It Now?!?

Attack of the Stepford People
With the thoughts I'd be thinkin'
I could be another Lincoln
If I only had a brain.

"In George W. Bush, people see a contained, channeled virility," said Erica Walter, identified as 'an at-home mom and Catholic writer.' "They see a man who does what he says, whose every speech and act is not calculated." [Ed.: Oh my GOD.]

Yeah. Nothing calculated about a president's delaying the troops from getting home and renting stadium lights so he can play dress up and make a movie-star landing on an aircraft carrier gussied up by his image wizards, at a cost of a mil.

David Gutmann, a professor emeritus of psychology at Northwestern, notes that Mr. Bush "bears important masculine stigmata: he is a Texan, he is not afraid of war, and he sticks to his guns in the face of a worldwide storm of criticism."

Stigmata, schtigmata. Shouldn't real men be able to control their puppets? The Bush team could not even get Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraq Governing Council to condemn the U.N. bombing or feign putting an Iraqi face on the occupation. The puppets refused because they didn't want to be seen as puppets.

Shouldn't real men be able to admit they made a mistake and need help? Rummy & Co. bullied the U.N. and treated the allies like doormats before the war, thinking they could do everything themselves, thanks to the phony optimistic intelligence fed to them by the puppet Chalabi. No wonder they're meeting with a cold response as they slink back.

Shouldn't real men be reducing the number of Middle East terrorists rather than increasing them faster than dragon's teeth?

- - Maureen Dowd.