If I were a right-winger, I supposed I'd be pretty steamed at Newsweek's "Wimp Factor" cover featuring Mitt Romney, and I might want to do a parody of it. But a parody that's going somewhat viral on the right is, well, curious:
This showed up somewhere off the beaten blog path, at the Web site of the John Locke Foundation, but it's been linked by Glenn Reynolds, husband of "men's rights" champion Dr. Helen Smith, and by beauty pageant aficionado John Hinderaker at Power Line.
I had problems with the original Newsweek cover, largely because it equates superficial masculinity with competence and integrity. But Michael Tomasky, who wrote the Newsweek cover story on Romney, was making a larger points about Romney's lack of principle. This parody is just about the horror of a male possibly listening to a woman. And, I suppose, a black woman (or two black women!) at that.
Of course, that wasn't a problem in George W. Bush's first term, when it was considered awesome that Condoleezza Rice had the president's ear because she was seen as a heroic freedom-fighter. (A recent Fox poll suggests that rank-and-file Republicans still like Rice a lot, and would really like her to be Romney's running mate.) Oh, and, when it suits their purposes, wingers sing the praises of Margaret Thatcher, Phyllis Schlafly, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Sarah Palin, and plenty of other women.
I'm struck by the Valerie Jarrett reference in this parody, and in the story the parody is citing, the one in the Daily Caller that said Jarrett got Obama to postpone the bin Laden raid three times. I expected the Caller story to dredge up all the sinister-sounding stuff in the right's Jarrett dossier -- her father-in-law was a big commie! -- but it's as if the right isn't even bothering to try to sell that story anymore. The bottom line on Jarrett seems to be: She has Obama's ear. She has a vagina. Isn't that horrible enough?
Really -- on manliness, this is all they've got? Their own fear of girl cooties, projected onto the rest of the electorate?
