Woolcott says the obvious, in excruciating detail. Whatever's going on with the Press and McCain? Its not going away soon:
Until that doomsday crisis is fully manufactured, however, the presidential election this November is the sumo match that will dominate the news and keep Chris Matthews on the edge of his high chair. The vicissitudes of his veering enthusiasms provide a fever chart of the political libido of the Beltway, its babbling pillow talk conducted in broad daylight. “Like Elvis, Matthews can’t help falling in love,” Eric Alterman wrote in the Nation column about Matthews’s Man Crushes. “And also like the King—who developed a thing for both Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover late in life—the object of Matthews’s affection is invariably a tough-talking, self-styled Republican macho-man.” More... McCain, of course (“A lot of people like the cut of John McCain’s jib”). Fred Thompson, whose humidor aroma he savored. And Rudy Giuliani, whom Matthews lionized for, among his other accomplishments as mayor of New York City, getting “the pee smell” out of the subway. But it isn’t always the macho man who vibrates Matthews’s harp strings. After an Obama victory speech carried live on MSNBC, Matthews exclaimed excitement about “this thrill going up my leg,” as if he were singer James Brown feeling the funk, ow. But Barack Obama’s willowiness and inability to pass muster as a member of the bowling team militate against his becoming a durable Man Crush object for the Beltway dilettanti, who wouldn’t be caught dead in a bingo hall. I await the inevitable moment when Matthews or Mike Barnicle or some other barstool philosopher announces that he has a Man Crush on Hillary Clinton once she’s out of the race. It would be a tribute to her toughness and a misogynist insult in one neat wrapper, but at least it wouldn’t have any of the stale piety that leaves a haze whenever John McCain is invoked. Even Karl Rove has begun sentimentalizing about McCain in print, which you know can’t be good. A Machiavellian with a Man Crush weaves a terrible web.
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