At least, they're not being asked to beat up their wives

OK, guys.  It's time we muscled up and strong-armed  all of the media talk going around that  we live in a "feminized" culture  that denies  men from being, well... men.  And by men, I'm talking about  an old fashioned  free-swinging, snorting  hulk of masculinity, sort of the Marlboro  man before we learned that even tough guys can die of lung cancer.

There was the funereal  lament, for example, of  Brit Hume, the Fox news analyst,  who traced Chris Christie's problems not to the George Washington Bridge but to the decline  of hard-assed bullies like the governor  who find it more and more troublesome these days to operate effectively in a patsy-fied  culture.

Said Hume:  "In this sort of  feminized atmosphere in which we exist today, guys who are masculine and muscular like that in their private conduct, kind  of old-fashioned tough guys, run some risks." (Hardly as risky, I'd  say,  than  your people  closing down the lanes to that bridge.)

Next, we find Nick Adams, the Australian author who has written a primer on how cowering men have been demasculated by feminists. (That sort of takes care of the Viagra cure, don't you think?)

Real men , he believes,  shoot guns.  It gets worse.   In his interview on Fox  & Friends, Adams was even asked by a worried Elisabeth Hasselbeck whether feminism and  the endangered male was a serious threat  to our national security  and "strong presence globally". Adams said he was absolutely sure of that, without a doubt.

As one who spent  some time in my childhood  watching a couple of burly cousins  arm-wrestling on the kitchen table to total exhaustion as one of Saturday night's lighter moments,   I must say I now prefer a gentler, kinder role for my guys.  Being manly about it,  I'll take my chances on National Security.





                                

For Christie , the cavalry is arriving...

Have you been following the anxiety attacks of  some Republicans who want to spin the bridge crises away from Gov. Christie's shadow?  Benghazi and Obama have fallen from the lips of the president's enemies. So have reprises of the IRS story. Anything to distract from the Fort Lee quake.

Some samples:

 Haley Barbour, the former GOP national chairman,  blamed Christie's woes on the "liberal media elite who continue to treat this like Lincoln's assassination."  (Shocking that right-wing Republicans from Mississippi even mention Lincoln these days.)

Reince Priebus, the current GOP chairman who is always good for a laugh, described Christie as a "smart person" and unlikely to know anything about his staff's involvement.  Not a "single link to Chris Christie  has been found," Reince protested.

But the runaway winner of the Grumpy Abe Linguistic Lunacy Award (GALL)  goes to Fox News panelist Brit Hume, who framed Christie's troubles as the consequence of a gender bias that denigrates macho men:

"I would have to say that in this sort of feminized   atmosphere in which we exist today, guys who are masculine and muscular like that in their private conduct, kind of old fashion tough guys run some risk...This guy is very much an old fashioned masculine, muscular guy  and there are political risks associated with that.  Maybe it shouldn't be, but that's how it is."

Maybe?

Guru Mitt is back. We knew him when...

I know it's not on your short list of things to know, but I will say it anyway:  Want to know what chutzpah is? I think I've figured it out beyond dispute.  It's Mitt Romney, the fellow who just lost an election by 5 million votes, piggybacking on Fox News as the emerging guru of choice to advise President Obama on how to run the Ship of State.

He hasn't learned that the political class doesn't really care what losers think, particularly those losers who were expected to win.  Is it rehab time for Mitt?  Republicans should hope not.

Speaking of Republicans, they did display a hint of intelligence by not inviting Chris Christie to the CPAC conference. Can anyone imagine a governor with a near-perfect approval rating in his home state appearing on the same program with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who  has a 27 pct. approval rating in Virginia (apart from his very conservative congressional district just  outside Richmond.)

And speaking more of Cantor, the March 4 issue of  the New Yorker examines the turmoil within the GOP in great depth to reveal how Speaker Boehner and Cantor serve at the pleasure of the Tea Party - the "unrulies" who have taken over the  Republican majority in the House, writes Ryan Lizza.   It's a long piece, but well worth a reader's time.

Groundskeeper Romney in a New Jersey allegory

Once upon a time - say, this week - a Republican presidential candidate  and savvy one-time groundskeeper boasted to a small gathering in Kettering, Oh., of his success in helping to clean up the debris from a football field.

It was another of candidate Mitt Romney's expressed can-do experiences while marooned in the Dayton suburb while Gov. Chris Christie and President Obama were taking care of business together in the destructive winds and tides of New Jersey in a mutually congratulatory  manner.

But as the can-do candidate has often asserted in his metallic utterances,  "I did it before and will do it again".  Yet,  perhaps saving the best of his tales for last in the closing days of his campaign,  there he was helping out with canned goods to be sent -  where? - "to New  Jersey, I think"-  while recalling his luminous business-like moment cleaning  up a football field.

Gather 'round.  Let the can-do candidate tell you how he solved the problem at his high school.

There had been a a big celebration at the field and some classmates were assigned to clean up the mess, "And I thought, 'how are we going to clean up all the mess on this football field?'" Remember,  class,  he was a mere teenager   already experiencing on-the-Bain-job can-do training.    (We are now deeply into the New Jersey allegory of man against nature spoken by a marooned presidential candidate who was not invited to the wedding on the eastern shores.)

 And it was determined that the cleaner-uppers would each take a different yard line "and just walk down and do your lane. And if everybody cleans their lanes, we'll get it done".

And so it happened that Obama and Christie and FEMA  and the other emergency crews were so busy they didn't find time to thank the can-do president when he said, "And so today, we're cleaning one lane if, you will."

You'd think that they could find a submerged high school football field  in Atlantic City (That's in New Jersey,  I think)  that would require a veteran like the can-do -president to clean it up.

Ohio GOP's sights on 2016 presidential primary

HOPEFUL OF being first in something other than alligators and flesh-eating beach flies, Florida's Republicans defied the fates and advanced the party's presidential primary to Jan. 31 from Mar. 6. That's next year, of course. The frantic response from other political futurists has been something less than kind.

Hopeful of being first in something other than secession, South Carolina promptly responded by moving up its primary to Jan. 21 and crossed its fingers that there would be no pro football playoffs that week to distract the party's voters.

Not so fast, aggrieved Republican loyalists in other states huffed. There is deep thought in New Hampshire for a possible December primary date. Nevada, possibly concerned with the state's time difference with the eastern media, may schedule a vote between midnight and dawn in November to make the important morning TV talk shows on the outcome.

And there is Iowa, which has a drawn-out layered caucus scheme with roots in the fussy election of a new Venetian doge. Iowa couldn't possibly leapfrog any of the other states unless it began its noble pursuit of respectful public notice on Halloween.

That leaves, I'm sorry to report, 45 other states to figure out their best chances for distinctive national electoral glory.

There are rumors hereabouts that Ohio's deep-thinking Republicans are trying to come up with a plan for a 2016 presidential primary to be held immediately after the OSU game with Michigan in November. Nice try, I suppose, inasmuch as there is little for the state to crow about these days, Gov. Kasich's boasts notwithstanding.

*******

It didn't take more than a minute after Chris Christie's Sherman-like decline of a presidential candidacy to bestir the national analysts to begin probing a post-Cristie era in the Republican field. Much of the Christie story was media driven from the outset despite his repeated denials of interest. It made for millions of analytical comments and kept on the front-burner speculation that surrounds national politics today by the talking heads.

Among Christie's many suitors were media mogul Rupert Murdoch, Henry Kissinger, pundit William Kristol and Gov. Kasich. Maybe the New Jersey governor was aware that with baggage like those guys would add to a campaign, he didn't need the inconvenience. So that chapter should end, but not before Mitt Romney and Rick Perry award Christie the game ball.

Christie's obesity finally noticed

NOW THAT THE "class warfare' rattle has paused for a good 15 minutes among the GOP presidential candidates, the media have turned to Chris Christie to reinvigorate the narrative. The story can now be told that the ample New Jersey governor is...um...obese. Not just obese, mind you. Morbidly obese! That, plus asthma attacks, and you have a non-presidential candidate no matter how much his Republican half-loonies want none of the above who are current.

If I may speak from experience, I'd say that Christie's resistance to a national candidacy is probably the wisest decision he will ever make. As one who has labored through several presidential and gubernatorial campaigns, I will trouble any disappointed Christie fans out there with my doubts that he could survive the merciless grind. As a much younger and able-bodied political reporter, I still ended up in traction and other therapy for months with painful back spasms that forced me to write my columns face-down on the living room floor with the typewriter inches from my chin.

For reporters, such stress, bad food and 20- hour days without week-end breaks still had a slight advantage over the candidates. No one cared whether our clothes were a disaster or whether we didn't trouble ourselves with a comb. Ill-tempered? So were our working colleagues. In other words, we didn't have to look pretty and sound presidential in front of an audience.

A politically incorrect way to describe Christie is that he is just plain perspiring fat. If a tough presidential campaign wouldn't imperil him, a lot of other health issues could send him to the emergency room at any moment on the trail. Let's leave it at that, since he seems to understand that more than everyone in his cheering section. Way to go, governor.

Christie's entry into the class warfare thing

FOOLED AGAIN. Just when I was beginning to think that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie wasn't as crazy as all those presidential wannabes who keep showing up for the TV debates, he turned up at the Reagan library sounding like Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry et al. As the keynote speaker, which was bound to pop a few forehead veins in his conservative audience, he launched into the class warfare thing that could have the makings of a new Hollywood film noir.

I won't keep you in suspense to learn the exciting plot. In so many words, he blamed President Obama of pandering to the poor at the expense of the rich. Or as he put it, Obama is "telling those who are scared and struggling that the only way their lives can get better is to diminish the success of others..[by] insisting that we must tax and take and demonize those who have already achieved the American dream."

Unfortunately, much of that self-serving dream was created by Wall Street, which has shown no interest in giving up its largesse, no matter what Obama or anybody else thinks of it. As for the scared strugglers, Guv, aren't there an army of them living in Newark, New Jersey , who have no hope of ever having a desk on the carpet at the Bank of America or Goldman Sachs? (As long as we're at it, that would include Middle Class America, too.)

But his Reagan library audience would have been shocked to hear a back-east Republican type tarnish America's high rollers. So I must ask: Who will play Christie in the Hollywood movie now that Sidney Greenstreet has moved on?