The Story They Won't Let Die, at All Costs

Can we drop the fucking haircut stories? Why do people get paid to write this shit?

I know the supposed narrative-how can Mr. Two Americas really care about the common man if he gets a $400 HAIRCUT? Whatever. After living through the 2000 campaign hearing about the Andover Cowboy's regular-guy bona fides-despite the fact that he was a rich boy from an East Coast WASP family of long standing and power-I realized that the media's interest in this subject matter was selective. You could point to any successful candidate, Republican, Democrat, or other, and find an example of artifice or vanity, if you really looked-perhaps, renting a red pickup truck and having one of your operatives drive it for you on the campaign trail, so that you look like a real southern man. None of them wants to suffer the Nixon 1960 fate, Republican or Democrat. So, they make themselves up for the camera and try to portray themselves as positively as possible. But for the media, this only matters when it is a Democrat, as we see regularly.

How about this: this story line is vacuous bullshit, as it applies to Republicans and Democrats both. Edwards' haircuts and Fred's truck fakery, in the end, mean nothing to me, and affect the state of the country not at all. Bush's cowboy posturing was not a positive for the country in the least. If Edward's became President, he wouldn't run up a deficit buying hair care products, and no Republican President will solve the problems of the world arm-wrestling or ripping off their shirts and flexing their (mythical) brawn WWE style. These aren't stories. They're piffle. It's the policies, what these people plan to do as President, that matter, because those are what will affect me and millions of other people, every day.

UPDATE: Contrast the storybook-tough guy imagery so favored by the media and the Republicans with the reality of what they actually DO, here.