Free Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics by Glenn Greenwald Page B

Smith wrote: “How much you ask [ sic ] does it cost to look like that?” Smith continued:
     
Well, John Edwards’ campaign for president spent $400 on February 20, and another $400 on March 7, at a top Beverly Hills men’s stylist, Torrenueva Hair Designs.
    The expensive haircut is, of course, a perennial. Bill Clinton got zinged for getting a cut from Cristophe, and Hillary was found at one point to have buried a stylist on her campaign payroll.
    Obama, on the other hand, gets his cut cheap and frequent—but he does take the process seriously enough to hold his calls.
    Only Edwards, however, has had the care he takes with his hair memorialized on YouTube.
    Edwards’ campaign also spent money at two spas: Designworks Salon in Dubuque, and Pink Sapphire in Manchester.
     
    Over the phrase “memorialized on YouTube,” Smith provided a link to a widely disseminated video of Edwards from the 2004 presidential campaign where, prior to a television appearance, he brushes his hair in front of a mirror for thirty to forty seconds. That video was endlessly deployed by right-wing pundits and bloggers to mock Edwards during the campaign as an effeminate, vain girly-man obsessed with his hair. Not only did Smith link to the video as part of his haircut item, but the specific video he chose shows Edwards brushing his hair while blaring in the background is the song “I Feel Pretty.”
    That “I Feel Pretty” video alone has been viewed in excess of one million times on YouTube.
    GOP operatives repeatedly referred to Edwards during the 2004 campaign as “the Breck Girl,” a slur disseminated most helpfully by the New York Times political reporter Adam Nagourney. Nagourney, in a front-page Times article at the height of the 2004 campaign, actually granted anonymity to his “sources,” whom he described as “Bush officials,” to sling that emasculating insult at Edwards. (In this same ignominious article, Nagourney mindlessly parroted the same anonymous cowards as saying that Kerry “looks French,” leading to that “observation” becoming a favorite anti-Kerry insult of the national media throughout the campaign.)
    Three years later, in April 2007—in the midst of the Edwards hair “controversy”—Nagourney wrote in the New York Times about his 2004 hit piece, sheepishly acknowledging the significant role the “looks French” and “Breck Girl” attacks he published played in demeaning the personalities of Kerry and Edwards during the election:
     
Our story may have had the result of not only previewing what the Bush campaign intended to do, but, by introducing such memorably biting characterizations into the political dialogue, helping it.
     
    It apparently took Nagourney three years of deep contemplation to realize that turning over the front pages of the New York Times to anonymous partisan smear artists might actually end up bolstering their smears and cementing them in our national political dialogue.
    But Nagourney’s efforts were merely one component of the right-wing-machine/media onslaught that promoted—and continues to promote—the “Edwards Is a Faggot Girl” slur. Throughout 2007, with Smith’s Politico story as the fuel, Rush Limbaugh regularly posted Photoshopped pictures on his website of Edwards as an androgynous womanly freak, with long flowing hair, eye shadow, and lipstick. The New York Sun published an article headlined: “Could John Edwards Become the First Woman President?” a question then repeated by the likes of Limbaugh and the Wall Street Journal ’s James Taranto. And Ann Coulter capped the smear in April 2007 by famously appearing at one of the most prestigious conservative events and outright calling Edwards a “faggot.”
    From the time Smith first “broke” the Edwards haircut story on April 16 until May 2, The Politico itself ran no fewer than eight separate stories on Edwards’s hair, at one point even publishing an “investigative piece” in which it