coven of conservatives assembled in what coconspirator William F. Buckley Jr. announces as ''the off-the-record meeting of 20 right-wing editors, writers and diverse others'' has completed its election-year game plan, and their approach is as follows:
They will back George W. Bush on a theme of ''the identification of George W. with - well, the manly virtues.'' I am not making this up. Croons William, ''He is a man's man, and as such, a woman's man derivatively.''
Let us leave aside the question of whether we men are not all derived from the other gender: Is a man not born of woman, Will-yum? But the epicene quality of the conservatives' editorial war on Al Gore is remarkable, is it not?
Buckley breaks cover with the argument that Dubbaya's ''career and pursuits underline an intuitive understanding of a division of duties.'' Right, babe; me hunter, you gatherer. ''This means,'' Big Bill interpolates, ''that men should not affect to be other than men, and should not scorn the responsibilities of fatherhood and accountability.''
Whazzat mean? Is the implication that Al-the-androgynous is a closet cross-dresser? Listen closely: ''In contrast, Gore is the man who seems to deplore his manhood, so concerned is he for the composite human being, part male, part female, one-quarter Asian, one-third African-American and one-tenth gay.'' For the lip-readers, the Bill's bottom line is: Vote for Dubbaya, 'cause the other guy's not a real man.
You know the drill: real men eat meat, thump chest, shoot gun, execute convicts, watch football, scarf Lone Star Beer, sneer at feminists and gays and people of different cultures, and drive pickups, and did I leave anything out?
Nowhere in his Friday column that ran in the Globe and elsewhere did Buckley address Bush's camouflage slogan, that W. is ''the compassionate conservative.'' The word ''compassion'' drives right-wingers nuts, apparently. To them it means abortion, welfare, cheap prescription drugs for the elderly, Section 8 housing, a minimum wage, unemployment comp, Medicare, and Social Security - all of them things the conservative movement has either opposed in the past, or wishes to unravel in the next Bush reign.
This lifting of the veil on the coming right-wing editorial jihad is an unusually forthright acknowledgement of an underhanded tactic best left unexplained. Denying the manhood of your opponent, when said opponent is male, is the ultimate insult on the playground, the playing field, or in politics.
And denigrating the plodding Democratic standard-bearer as something less than a man is apparently a core element of the rubbish-the-other-guy strategy of the conservative movement again this year. They tried it with spending millions on ads demeaning Clinton-the-wimp. They did it with Dukakis-the-mope, who wouldn't slaughter a rapist or do the manly thing and execute prisoners. The right-wingers even tried it against George (Wimp Factor) Bush Sr. till he nailed down the post-Reagan GOP nomination.
There is no question this strategy works. You've heard about the gender gap? Right-wingers beat left-wingers among white males in the South and West, particularly, because Democrats are seen to be pro-women, pro-abortion, pro-welfare, and, let's face it, pro-black. The notion of the embattled white males fighting against the tide of feminisim, diversity, and gay rights is firmly entrenched in the Sunbelt, particularly.
And sneering at the Democrat as some kind of wimpy girly-man is an election-year staple of the entrenched right. Nixon, who gave us the racist Southern strategy that still profits the GOP to this day, got up his Hard Hats Brigades in a classic maneuver to discredit the antiwar movement by saying real men were pro-war.
Er, William: Was Jesus not a man? Is the Pope not against the death penalty? Is it wrong to succor the sick, clothe the naked, feed the hungry? Are gays not among all God's children, Bill? Does the Almighty really sort out the saved by checking resumes?
Do I have to genuflect to NRA archangel Charlton Heston to prove my chromosome count is correct? Or is this just the usual disgusting smear-by-sexual-innuendo that prurient right-wing editors serve up every four years?
Buckley recounts how conservatives mistrusted President Eisenhower for being supposedly ''wobbly'' on the communist threat. Ike won World War II for the democracies in Europe, is all he did, fending off the Russkies in the process. But to the Red-under-every-bed claque that Buckley defends, Ike was a dupe, a dope, a ditz: ''He had not risen to the challenge posed by the Soviet repression of the freedom fighters in Hungary, while undermining the British attempt to recapture control of the Suez Canal, and had proved ineffectual in hand-to-hand diplomacy with Khruschev.''
What a load of codswollop. The right then, as the right now, yearns for a rollback of history, to the day when rich white males who spoke the King's English ruled not only Britannia but every other oil patch. Real men don't eat quiche and don't fall for this garbarge. Gore may be a plodder, but he went to Vietnam, which is more than Bush Jr. did, and to suggest he is a failed male is cheap gutter politics, of the type we expect from the paranoid right.
David Nyhan is a Globe columnist.
