PUDGY BOY TOUGH GUYS

The problem with American foreign policy in this century, including the nation’s misnamed war on terror (it’s actually a war against radical Islamic anti-modernists), has been that Pudgy Boy Tough Guys are calling the shots. What’s a Pudgy Boy Tough Guy? Simply someone who talks tough but who has rarely taken or delivered a punch, either physically or metaphorically. In short, someone who has little understanding of the difficulties in actually getting things done in this world.

Pudgy Boy Tough Guys have spent most of their lives talking for a living. They may have been politicians, such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. They may have been CEOs of mature corporations, also such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. CEOs primarily talk for a living? You bet, particularly if the organization is a mature one. Bill Gates built an organization from scratch, a real accomplishment. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld stepped into the leadership of existing organizations, yelled at a few subordinates, made a few decisions from a selection of options handed to them by those trembling subordinates, and concluded to themselves that they were great leaders. CEOs are the most overly compensated, overly worshiped individuals in American capitalism. Mature corporations run themselves, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, and the CEO is little more than a busy bee figurehead.

Another Pudgy Boy Tough Guy is George W. Bush. He may look trim and fit but at heart he is a Pudgy Boy. Born to wealth (visit Kennebunkport sometime and gaze upon the Bush island estate; that ain’t no log cabin, folks), a business career greased by family and political connections, a political career similarly padded, George Bush learned tough talk without having to think much about the consequences of failure. He had a safety net—family, money, and alternative opportunities—that ordinary folk don’t have.

Advising George Bush may be the ultimate Pudgy Boy Tough Guy, Karl Rove.

And then there are the Pudgy Boy Tough Guy cheerleaders—the think tankers from the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and similar institutions and the sympathetic members of the media. Let’s name some names: neoconservatives in general, the Wall Street Journal editorial board (Paul Gigot, Daniel Henninger, and friends), Fox News, Sean Hannity, William Kristol, Fred Barnes, Brit Hume, Bill O’Reilly, Charles Krauthammer, Newt Gingrich, Kate O’Beirne, and Rush Limbaugh, for starters.

Religious leaders are also among the Pudgy Boy Tough Guy cheerleaders. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson come readily to mind.

All of these individuals and groups make their living by talking, and their talk is tough. What they haven’t had to do much of is physically get something done, is implement the tough talk. They talk and someone else does the implementing. In particular, most of them have little first hand knowledge of the messiest, most difficult environment in which to get things done, the battlefield. And they have no recognition of or humility about their lack of experience.

Let’s bring the discussion down to the essence, remove it from esoteric level of, well, talk. If you were about to enter a badass biker bar, would you be comfortable with any of the aforementioned groups or individuals watching your back? Karl Rove? Fred Barnes? Dick Cheney? That’s right, they would be out of their element. Similarly, they are out of their element when they talk tough about the world’s problems without having much background in implementing tough talk. Yes, Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense during the First Gulf War. But some guys with real world experience in implementing tough talk were around him: George Herbert Walker Bush, Colin Powell, and Norman Schwarzkopf.

Just because you have been a talker all your life doesn’t disqualify you from being a leader, from policy making or policy influencing positions. But you need to know what you don’t know. And the Pudgy Boy Tough Guys haven’t shown that they realize their limited life experiences have left major gaps in their knowledge.

This nation has for real tough guys, and gals. They, and the rest of us, deserve better leadership than has been provided in the first years of the 21st Century by the Pudgy Boy Tough Guys.

dsh