The U.S. Is Not a "Feminized Atmosphere" - Life Is Just Getting Harder If You're an Asshole

Fox News' Brit Hume is an asshat. He argued the other day that Chris Christie's bridge blocking scandal is just a man being a good old fashioned man, you know, an asshole, and that he is only in trouble because America is too feminized. Via Esquire.

We Are Not Living in a Feminized Atmosphere - We've Just Made Life Harder If You're an Asshole

By Ben Collins on January 13, 2014

Fox News’ Brit Hume knows why all you peons are lapping up this Chris Christie Bridgegate story. It’s not because Christie’s administration made his constituents’ commutes a living hell solely over a petty political grudge that no average person had anything to do with.

No, it’s because you’re all a bunch of fairies who need to do some lifting, stat.

Punch yourself in the face and listen up, sissies:

Well, I would have to say that in this sort of feminized atmosphere in which we exist today, guys who are masculine and muscular like that in their private conduct, kind of old fashion tough guys, run some risk.  

I mean that men today have learned the lesson the hard way—that if you act like a kind of an old fashioned guy’s guy, you’re in constant danger of slipping out and saying something that’s going to get you in trouble and make you look like a sexist or make you look like you seem thuggish or whatever. That’s the atmosphere in which he operates. This guy is very much an old fashioned masculine, muscular guy, and there are political risks associated with that. Maybe it shouldn’t be, but that’s how it is.

There is no grander American past where you went to the store and fought the clerk fair and square for a jug of milk. That era did not exist. Not everybody lined up red rover-style and snapped at one another to assert dominance until a fist/knifefight broke out. That was West Side Story, and West Side Story is a musical where they would only stop stabbing each other to dance, and we’re not even going to get into the gender politics of that.

Even back in the days of the venerated/since-bastardized-into-something-unrecognizable Founding Fathers, everybody wore wigs to hide their crippling insecurities brought upon largely by syphilis. Have you seen John Hancock's signature? Alexander Hamilton’s pen name in the Federalist Papers was “Glory Hole Johnson.” (Okay, that one's a joke.)

Maybe Brit Hume is thinking of the beautiful 1950s, where if your wife didn’t smell coffee before bringing it home from the supermarket, even advertisements would implore you to beat the living shit out of her until she figured it out. This was basically a cottage industry.

Just to get on the record for this one: That era was worse. Rhetorically, that was a bad time.

Not only is being an asshole an undesirable and unnecessary trait — one that's counterintuitive to getting stuff done and leading a beneficial life — it’s also not why Chris Christie is catching hell.

The media has latched onto this story — this unbelievably boring story about traffic, by the way, which is the world’s sleepiest subject — because this is the definitive role of the press in America: To out precisely this kind of corruption before somebody like this runs for president.

But while we’re at it, remember: The only thing less manly than acting like a tough guy is inquiring where all of the tough guys went, to an audience of nobody.