Our Senior [sic] Senator, Josh Hawley, gave another performance of virtuoso sleaze in his recent questioning of Secretary Mayorkas. Using the logic best suited to his audience, he asked the Secretary if the deranged anti-Israeli posting of a single Homeland Security employee indicates an anti-Israeli bias through the entire Agency. It was almost like asking if the dog-whistle anti-semitism and racism of Trump and his followers in Congress means that all Trumpists are bigots. 

Hawley is frenetically ambitious and is counting on Trumpism to advance his career. So he never misses an opportunity to enhance the deception of those who are already deceived. 

Josh Hawley, former resident of Missouri, knows that there is no such thing as bad publicity. After pissing himself at the Jackson hearing, he is now trying another stunt to get the attention he so desperately craves. He will block confirmations of high-level appointments to the Dept. of Defense until his complaints and hurt feelings receive some grown-up attention. He is the poor little rich boy who is trying by bad behavior to get the attention he cannot get otherwise. So Josh runs from house to house ringing doorbells, overturning trash cans, turning on sprinklers, and letting air out of tires. 

I used to assume that ivy-league Josh’s puerile persona was mere playacting for the base, but now I’m thinking his melodramatic immaturity is for real.

Sen. Josh Hawley is a right-wing juke box. Put in a quarter, and you can select any reactionary golden oldie you like. The “National Conservatism Conference” at which he spoke must have pushed the button for “Manhood.” There Josh denounced the idea of “toxic masculinity,” wailed that “manhood” is being treated as a disease, and called for a return to traditional roles — by which I’m sure he means that men give the orders and women obey. I’m sure he was enthusiastically applauded by the attendees at this convention. His topic is a favorite of his audience and he himself embodies what he had undertaken to defend. For Hawley is one of the more notable examples of latter day toxic masculinity as manifested in his desperate ambition and energetic deceit and menu of the right-wing Top Ten. 

He said something to the effect that men are being so side-lined in America that many of them are resorting to idleness, pornography, and (oh Heavens!) computer games. He lamented “Manhood, it seems, is a disease that needs to be defeated.” What can he mean by manhood? The best he can offer is a re-run of a traditional caricature, and this cartoon manhood is, he says, being ground down by persecution. But what he really means is “Yikes, guys, we’re losing control!”

As I look around the world around me, I see no diminution of “traditional manhood,” among men and among women who imitate men. But manhood is not the disease. It’s testosterone poisoning that is the ancient pandemic that we’ve not yet learned to treat.

Hawley is urging Trump to veto the compromise COVID19 relief bill that Hawley has denounced because it does not include another massive handout. Is this “fiscally responsible” Republican standing up for the needy and advocating a welfare state? No, he is only an hyper-ambitious demagogue who tries to turn anything that comes along to his political advantage, always simulating a concern for the common people. If he craves political success he should keep his mouth closed.