Masculinity is hard.

I was just noticing a few days ago that Elspeth Reeve seems to have the Hillary + gender gig at the New Republic. She's the one who wrote the much-linked "Why Do So Many People Hate the Sound of Hillary Clinton's Voice?"

Her new one is "No Campaigns for Manly Men." Supposedly, without the broad, loud-mouthed, bullying Chris Christie in the presidential race, we have no "manly men." You might want to challenge that characterization of Christie, but that's the way Reeve presents him as she sets up her argument that the real men are gone.

Who�s the manly man�s man of the right? It�s not a politician like Ted Cruz, who exudes �televangelist� more than �cowboy.� It�s not a pundit like Glenn Beck, who cries over the Constitution and sells premium dad jeans. Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Bobby Jindal�they�re all kind of cute, and certainly non-threatening. Jeb Bush is selling himself as the Smart Bush.

"Manly man�s man"? What is this category we're supposed to believe in and care about? Is a "manly man�s man" something beyond a mere "manly man" or a "man�s man"? What the hell are we talking about? Reeve doesn't proceed to analyze what manliness means to people as they search for a political leader. She just consults the linguist Geoff Nunburg:

�It�s hard to think of manly men,� Nunberg mused. 

Is musing manly? Nunberg's got nunthing.

Guys like Jim Webb of Virginia. 

I guess that's Reeve's prompt to the musing Nunberg. Subtext: Democrats have a manly man.

�Christie was going to be that but Christie�s a joke.� Or at least, people are starting to see him as one, Nunberg said. He could only think of the manly man�s cousin: the asshole. Nunberg explained: "Assholes do very well on the right in particular. I wrote a book about assholes..."

Nunberg opines that Ted Cruz is "clearly an asshole," which makes Nunberg sound like an asshole. I mean, the guy wrote a book about assholes. Asked to talk about manliness, his instincts were to shift to a topic he understood (assholes), to push his own book, and to take an easy swipe at a convenient other ("the right").

Masculinity is hard.