You're Welcome, America

This weekend, HBO aired Will Ferrell's one-man-show, "You're Welcome America: A Final Night with George W. Bush." Ferrell's impression was spot-on, as always, though I think he, like most people who send up Bush, play too heavily his idiocy and douchiness, without giving enough time to commenting on how Bush is actually a real mean fucking asshole, too, who blew up frogs for fun as a kid and bullied other world leaders with condescending nicknames and unwanted backrubs.

The below clip [NSFW] of the show highlights pretty well what was good and what was bad about it; I've transcribed just part of it below, but you'll get the idea if you can't watch it. My commentary follows the transcript.

My time at Yale was great; it was very formative. I received a Bachelors degree in history, and my nickname was Gin & Tonic. [TRUE] While at Yale, I was a member of a secret society called the Skull and Bones, which I used to call "Skull and Boners." The guys thought that was funny for about a month, heh, then they asked me to please stop. But I didn't. 'Cuz I'm tenacious.

This society is so secret, I should have to stop talking about it. I can't tell ya anything more about it. Okay, I'll tell ya one thing. But it does not leave the theater, okay?

During the intense initiation period, you have to divulge all your sexual exploits to your potential fellow brothers, and I revealed to the group how I had just participated in my first threesome with two hot Latina women and a guy named Dave Rothchild. What I didn't realize was this was actually a four-way. I always thought a threesome was three people plus yourself.

Yeah, well, we all had a good laugh about that, then someone said, "Seriously, though—why was there another guy there in the first place?" And I explained how he wasn't there at first. At first it was just me and the two hot Latina women, gettin' at it. And I mean gettin' at it! There was muff flyin' everywhere. I'm talkin' knee-deep in muff. Had to get your muff waders on. You know what I mean? Needless to say, there was a high volume of muff. Is there anyone at this point in the story who's confused as to how much muff there was? 'Cuz I can keep going with the analogies. Okay, you know the Great Wall of China? Imagine that's made entirely of muff. You know those water cannons that riot police shoot to hose down crowds? Imagine the only thing coming out is liquid muff. At, like, three thousand pounds per second. Yeah. We got it covered? 'K. Muff said.

So, the first part, about Skull and Bones was really, genuinely hilarious—because it's something you can totally imagine Bush saying. "Skulls and Boners." Yeah, that's classic Bush humor.

But then the whole "muff" riff? Nope. Bush, like a lot of conservative men, is weirdly prudish in the way he talks about sex with women; it's a familiar quirk of the wealthy patriarchy that the more likely a guy is to wrassle with other dudez in the locker room of a private, elite, all-male school or club, and the more likely he is to be found snapping their naked asses with a towel while calling them fags without a trace of irony, the less likely he is to be comfortable talking about vaginas, no less using epithets like "pussy" or "muff." (Especially not once he has daughters.)

The other thing people miss about Bush is that, despite his constructed aw-shucks shtick, he's a fucking snob. His Potemkin ranch in Crawford was sold so he could hightail it to an exclusive, all-white gated community as soon as his presidency was over, because he's the blue-blood elitist that his minions always accused his opponents of being. And talking about "muff" is some low-class shit. Men like Bush have nothing but contempt for men who talk like that.

It just doesn't ring true.

And because it doesn't ring true, it's just gratuitous sexism.

The thing is, Bush is, of course, an unrepentant sexist. And the way that sexism would have manifested, if this actually had been a night with Bush, and not a night with Ferrell-doing-Bush, is that women wouldn't have come up at all, because they're not worth talking about.

That's the sort of distinction a target of sexism notices and a purveyor of sexism doesn't.