I’m a little slow getting around to blogging about this, but here we go anyway. I saw on the local TV news a few nights ago that Vice President Dick “Go F*** Yourself” Cheney paid a visit to my hometown on Wednesday to rally the troops. He needn’t have bothered. To paraphrase Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, Utah is kind of a sure thing for the Republican Party. Our electoral votes would go to the GOP if they ran a one-legged platypus as their candidate, just so long as that platypus wore an American flag pin and mouthed the appropriate slogans about “family values.” (Insert wisecrack about family values and publicly telling senators to perform anatomical impossibilities on themselves here.)

I don’t especially like the political tilt of my home state, but Republican dominance is one of those inescapable facts of life here in the Land of Zion, just like screwy liquor laws, summer wildfires, and the difficulty of finding a nice, quiet restaurant that doesn’t double as a playground for hordes of small children. But those are rants for another time.

Today’s rant has to do with a so-called joke made by Mr. Cheney as he addressed a few hundred party loyalists who had plopped down $250 a plate to share salad ‘n’ chicken with Dick and Utah congressional candidate John Swallow. At the conclusion of Cheney’s speech, Swallow presented the Veep with a Utah Jazz team jersey to commemorate his visit here. (For any out-of-staters or non-sports-fans out there on the InterWeb who don’t know, the Jazz is Utah’s NBA franchise, the only major-league pro sports team we’ve got here. Why the team is called “the Jazz,” considering that Utah is not exactly known as a mecca for lovers of this particular musical genre, is a long story.) Cheney examined the jersey, then held it up for the cameras and said something to the effect of, “I’d put this on but I wouldn’t want to look as silly as John Kerry did in that spacesuit.” (This isn’t verbatim — I didn’t think to take notes while watching the news, and this little aside isn’t reported in the article linked above — but this was the general idea of what he said.)

Cheney was referring to this unflattering moment, photographed during Kerry’s recent visit to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida:

Now, many Republicans besides Cheney have also made sport of this image in the last week, but it was the Vice President’s remark that finally sent me over the edge. Every right-winger who has commented on this, at least the ones I have heard, has used similar enough phraseology that I’m considering having myself measured for a tinfoil hat. Has the GOP issued an official talking point about the photo? It almost seems that way, and that pisses me off on a number of levels. So it’s time for a little rebuttal, with some debunking and some unabashed venting thrown in for good measure.
First of all, it is inaccurate to call the garment Kerry is wearing in the photo a “spacesuit.” It is not a spacesuit, which is a pressurized garment worn in the vacuum of space. It is, in fact, a simple anti-contamination coverall designed to keep all the nasty detritus of the human body — hair, flakes of skin, and lint — from getting into and damaging delicate electronics and other systems that don’t respond well to that sort of thing. Systems like you’d find in, for example, a NASA “clean room” and the spacecraft that reside therein. (Before anyone tries to claim that it’s natural to call this thing a spacesuit because it’s used by the spacemen at NASA, let me point out that this same sort of suit is used in a number of different industries, notably microchip manufacturing. Would Cheney have called it a spacesuit if Kerry had been touring an Intel factory? Doubtful. And just as incorrect if he had.)

Furthermore, the implication of the Republican jests is that Kerry was somehow doing something wrong by wearing such a garment, as if he were a child playing dress-up games with Daddy’s uniform. That is utter nonsense. He wasn’t playing at being an astronaut and he didn’t put that thing on just for the cameras, either. It was entirely appropriate for Kerry to be wearing this suit because he was, at the time, touring the space shuttle Discovery, an obvious clean room environment that mustn’t be dirtied by people tramping through it in their street clothes. Everyone else in the entourage was wearing those suits, too, including the NASA tour guide. (If you dig around on the ‘net, you’ll find another photo of Kerry standing with his guide, who is similarly dressed.) I imagine that every VIP who is lucky enough to poke around an actual space shuttle is asked to wear one of these things. But then I also imagine that Mr. Cheney and all the talk-radio attack dogs know that. They aren’t making these remarks out of ignorance. They’re making them to belittle their opponent and try to make him look foolish in the eyes of the voter without actually addressing what he stands for. It’s a deliberate strategy, and they’ve used it before. Remember this one?

This image was inescapable in 1988. The campaign to elect Cheney’s previous boss, George H.W. Bush, used it to convince the easily-swayed that Dukakis was clueless on defense because he was naive enough to be photographed wearing a helmet that was too big for his head. Now maybe Dukakis was clueless on defense and maybe he wasn’t, but I don’t recall that the public ever heard an honest, rational argument to that effect. Instead, we got a lot of sniggering asides and snarky remarks centered around this photograph.

This tactic pissed me off in ’88 and it still does. It’s childish and bullying, and in my mind it says a lot more about the person who makes these remarks than the person being remarked upon. It says to me that someone prefers to insult his opponent behind his back than confront him face-to-face. It suggests that maybe the person doing the insulting fears they can’t win in an actual debate, so they resort to this kind of image-making (or is that image-busting?) rather than risk losing face on the issues.

I’m sure someone out there is reading this right now and thinking that I’m a thin-skinned liberal who can’t handle a little teasing. Incorrect. I’d be the first person to admit that Kerry looks pretty silly wearing that coverall. But I’d also add that everyone looks pretty silly wearing one of those things (they don’t call them “bunny suits” for nothing) and it doesn’t change the fact that he had a perfectly good reason for wearing it. If we wanted to get really nasty and talk about poseurs who like to play dress-up, I might remind people of this moment:

While President Bush looks undeniably more macho in his flightsuit than Kerry does in his bunny suit, you’d have to be pretty sharp to convince me there was any good reason for him to be wearing it. There’s no doubt in mind that this was a very coldly calculated photo-op moment, and a pretty obviously staged one at that.

But I’m not going to go on about it. I just wanted to point out that both sides can play these games, and frankly I wish that neither side would. I have little tolerance for these swaggering, elementary-school games of name-calling. If I had my way, I’d impose a political sarcasm fine which would be evenly applied by a non-partisan enforcement committee. If any candidate or the representative of any candidate makes a snarky comment about an opponent, that side loses a day of television coverage and pays a hefty sum to their opponent’s campaign fund. There would be no recourse, no appeal. Put your money where your mouth is, boys. Then maybe the discourse in this nation would get back to talking about the things that matter instead of who has a bigger sock stuffed down their pants. Either that, or things would get very quiet indeed…