Over on Majority Report today, they played a bit from a recent Fox & Friends episode that featured Nick Adams. He wrote a book called The American Boomerang. The book is an Australian conservative’s idea of a “pep talk” for America. Go team! Whatever. But he was brought on the show to talk about the feminization of men in general and American men in particular. This is not, apparently, something that Adams can even pretend to be an expert on. But Fox News is pushing this narrative so they are reaching out to anyone who will agree with them.

In the small part that Sam Sedar played, the whole gang was going to town on the idea that we must teach our boys that it is okay to be themselves. And by that, they mean a totally stereotypical view of what a man is. My take on it is just the opposite. Men are acting more like they want. Most men do not not want to act like the boys in Lord of the Flies, nor do most of them dream of the days when it was fine to pinch your secretary’s butt.

The place that these ridiculous ideas of manhood come from are adolescent fantasies about manhood. This is how people assumed their fathers (and actually, more accurately, grandfathers) behaved. And I’m sure there were those kinds of men. But just as now, there were all kinds of men. Today what we call a metrosexual is what we used to call a dandy. There wouldn’t have been a word for it if it were that unusual.

There are lots of ways to be a man. But what the people on Fox & Friends are calling for is not for men to be allowed to be men. They are calling for certain men to be allowed to be assholes with impunity. So you see: no one is stopping, for example, Chris Christie, from being an asshole. We all have to deal with people like him. But these conservatives want us to pretend that the way that Christie acts is right. And it clearly has been for most of the voters of New Jersey. But it’s not right as far as I’m concerned. He’s a bully. Not because he’s a “man’s man,” but because he uses his power to pick on people who aren’t as powerful as he is. I knew such people were bullies when I was 5-years-old; I’m not going to pretend they aren’t now.

Above all, shouldn’t conservatives define the ideal of manhood as something more, you know, conservative. Shouldn’t it be someone more like Charles Ingalls on Little House on the Prairie? Isn’t a real man one who protects the weak? When did it become someone like Christie? By this logic, Genghis Khan should be our ideal. He killed a lot of men and fucked a lot of women. Is that what the ultimate conservative man is now? Or is it just that they want to thread the needle: the ultimate man is whichever conservative politician they are currently pushing. Even when it’s a woman.

Chris Christie started his second term today.[1] I saw a bit of it. (I try to avoid these things because they are boring.) But one line really stood out to me, “We have to be willing to play outside the red and blue boxes the media and pundits put us in.” That’s interesting. I didn’t know it was the pundits that were putting politicians in these boxes; I thought it was the choice of each politician. You know: the way I’m a Democrat because I agree more with that party than with the Republicans.

Let’s leave aside the fact that it is looking more and more like Christie has run New Jersey like an old political boss from Chicago where money trumps ideology. That’s generally true of modern Republicans, anyway. But when it comes to ideology, Christie’s “moderation” is phantasmagoric. You can see it in the writings of those political pundits who Christie claims try to put him in a box, but not in reality.

One of the main ways that Christie is “different” from the GOP generally is that he accepts climate change. But as I wrote before, “Christie’s affirmation of climate change has been so weak as to be useless.” What’s more, in a Republican presidential primary, I suspect he would walk that back with something like, “Well, I don’t know, I just think we should look into it.” And that is pretty much the current state of climate change denial: we need more study! When it comes to workers rights and economic issues generally, he is absolutely ideologically pure. All that yelling at teachers? That’s not just because he’s an asshole; it is also because he hates unions. And finally, on social issues he is also absolutely ideologically pure. He’s anti-choice. He’s anti-gay.

The question logically comes up, “Why do people claim that Christie is a moderate?” I think it is simple as this: his rhetoric isn’t as extreme as that we hear coming out of Texas. The biggest part of this is that he doesn’t use religious language about sin and damnation. He talks like people normally do in New York and Washington so he seems like a regular guy. Of course, what’s really going on is that Christie just has a different approach to “fire-breathing” conservatism. It is encapsulated in what Paul Krugman calls him, “Governor Yells-at-People.”

What the current Christie scandals show, regardless of whether he is directly involved or not, is that any actual ability to “work across the isle” is nothing but power politics: forcing the other side to do his bidding. He isn’t interested in “compromise,” that vaunted end-in-itself for “centrist” pundits. Regardless, Republican executives usually get more done with Democratic legislatures than the other way around. Why? Because Democrats are more compliant. If Christie had had to deal with the Democratic equivalent of Mitch McConnell in his legislature, he wouldn’t have gotten anything done—except, of course, through his standard extortion techniques.

So it really annoys me to hear Christie pontificate about the media putting politicians in boxes. Christie put himself in a very small red box. The media have been working overtime to make it appear as though he weren’t a completely ideologically consistent Republican. The media want “bipartisanship” and “compromise.” And they have anointed Christie as the bringer of that, regardless of the facts. For him to pretend otherwise is disingenuous and, frankly, hilarious.

[1] That’s yet another Watergate aspect of this. A lot of people don’t remember, but the Watergate scandal was going strong even during Nixon’s re-election campaign. The Congressional hearings only got going later, but the scandal was out there for all voters to notice, had they been paying attention.

Yesterday, Paul Krugman wrote, The Undeserving Rich. This is a favorite issue around here. Conservatives try to argue that the poor are not deserving and the rich are. In fact, Krugman wrote a blog post about this last week that I discussed, The Rich Versus the Upper Class. (This is quite typical; if you read Krugman’s blog, you don’t really need to read his columns, although I still do.)

Anyway, in the column, he called Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal to task for just outright lying about the recent economic progress of the poor in this country, Obama’s Envy Problem. Quoting from the Census Bureau, Stephens claimed that the incomes of the bottom fifth of earners have gone up 186% since 1979. This, of course, is wrong. That is not inflation adjusted. If you adjust for inflation (which Krugman points out, the Census Bureau did in the exact same table Stephens got the 186% number from), the bottom fifth of earners have seen their pay go down.

That’s embarrassing. Really embarrassing. In fact, when that error is fixed, Stephens’ article has nothing. It is the linchpin of the whole article. He criticized Obama for talking about inequality. Basically, he was saying, “Sure, the rich are getting richer, but so are the poor!” Except, of course, they’re not. But hey, we all make mistakes. Live and learn. Yet Stephens’ article went uncorrected.

So Krugman upped the ante. Later yesterday, he called out Stephens in a blog post, Department of Corrections, and Not. Apparently, Stephens had complained to the New York Times that since he had written his original article, Stephens had put out another article on how one really ought to use inflation adjusted numbers when looking at such issues. This is one of the most chickshit things I have ever seen in my life. All Stephens would have to do is add an update, “The 186% number is not inflation adjusted. The number is actually blah blah blah.”

It has now been almost two days since Krugman’s column first came out (they come out the night before about 7:00 pm west coast time). And still, there is no correction. Forget about Stephens. What does this say about The Wall Street Journal? Have they no shame? Well, historically, The Journal’s editorial page in fact has had no shame. But I don’t see how Stephens and company live with themselves. When I find out about an error I’ve made, I’m a wreck until I correct it. But conservative “journalist” either just take down embarrassing article or pretend they aren’t wrong, which is pretty much the same thing.

Even worse than this shameful and totally indefensible conduct on the part of conservatives is the effect that this has on other conservatives. People will go on writing articles about the fact that there is no economic inequality problem and they will quote from Stephens’ article. Now, they are conservatives, so maybe they’d just do the same thing Stephens did and pick a convenient number to make their points. But one thing is clear: the conservative movement will never become fact-based if their premiere publications can’t even be bothered to correct their most egregious errors.

Afterword

Bret Stephens won a Pulitzer for commentary last year. That doesn’t speak well for American journalism generally. I don’t mean to say that this one mistake makes Stephens a bad writer. Just last week, I rather liked his criticism of Robert Gates’ new book. But what he’s doing now speaks to a general sense of not caring about facts. The Pulitzer citation reads, “Awarded to Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal for his incisive columns on American foreign policy and domestic politics, often enlivened by a contrarian twist.” Contrary to the facts?