What the GOP Needs: More John Wayne, Less Dick Cheney

Remember when the Republican Party in America was the party of John Wayne? The movie icon was the epitome of the red-blooded conservative American, symbolizing and speaking out for the core GOP principles of responsibility, personal freedom, and courageous and unwavering belief in the American system of government.

I don’t think John Wayne would have much common ground with the national Republican Party of today, particularly on that last count.

Let’s first take up the most recent and obvious example: the continued call by former vice-president Dick Cheney and others for extra-Constitutional enhanced interrogation techniques, the practice formerly known as torture. Just minutes after President Obama’s speech yesterday where he called for dealing with terrorism detainees and the closing of the prison at Guantanamo Bay in accordance with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, there was Dick Cheney, trying his best to make Americans feel, not courageous and confident about our system’s ability to handle this, but afraid. Very afraid.

“In his address to the American Enterprise Institute , a conservative policy organization in Washington , Cheney said that the techniques the Bush administration approved, including waterboarding — simulated drowning that's considered a form of torture — forced nakedness and sleep deprivation, were ‘legal’ and produced information that ‘prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people.’”

Set aside the highly-debatable notion that torture extracted any actionable, accurate information, and instead apply the John Wayne standard. Would Duke Wayne be traveling from one end of the country to the other, fighting to defend America’s right to strip and torture even enemy combatants? I don’t think so. John Wayne died long before 9/11, but I’ll bet his faith in the Constitution to provide the guidelines to deal with matters like these would have survived even that.

Let’s apply the WWJWD? test (what would John Wayne do?) to some other recent situations:

• Republicans AND Democrats in the Senate seem to believe that a few hundred prisoners from Guantanamo Bay couldn’t be transferred to maximum security prisons in the U.S., because the idea of these mean men on American soil is just too scary. WWJWD? John Wayne would realize no one has ever escaped from a super-max prison, and that many terrorists are already imprisoned here (along with countless homegrown serial killers and mass murderers we’ve somehow managed to keep locked up). But mostly, he just wouldn’t have been scared, and he wouldn’t have been trying to convince other people that they should be scared, too.

• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the CIA misled her about waterboarding. That may be arguable, to put it mildly. But how did congressional republicans and party mouthpieces respond? That she needed to apologize to the CIA! WWJWD? He would have deplored the recently-developed GOP habit of coming down with the vapors every time someone looks at them cross-eyed or questions their policy positions, and that there are, shall we say, more manly ways of dealing with flak from someone in the opposing party than getting your feelings hurt over and over. And does the CIA even accept apologies? It’s the CIA, for cryin’ out loud!

• Republican leaders have gotten very worked up over otherwise inconsequential actions by President Obama, like shaking the hand of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, and taking a few minutes to share his bracket choices with other fans for the NCAA basketball tournament. WWJWD? He’d have no respect for an American president who can’t look a minor foreign leader in the eye and acknowledge him man-to-man, but he damn sure would have respected a president for having a sincere interest in sports.

John Wayne wasn’t just a movie icon, he was an emblem of American masculinity. I think if he were around today, he’d tell the GOP’s whiny wing to man-up, to stop being so delicate, to stop trying to scare people, and to share his faith in the American principles he proudly represented, on screen and in real life. As the Republican Party tries to figure out ways to stay relevant, and appeal to more than a quarter of the American people, it might do worse than to hold a John Wayne film festival... at least for its members who want to secede from the Union, or who would express their desires for a U.S. president—of any party—to fail.