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educated to a point of responsibility. I don’t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership to irresponsible people.
     
    The Playboy interview was one of the few truthful and candid moments of Wayne’s sad and deceitful life. Just like George W. Bush on his Texas ranch, even the recreational activities Wayne pretended to enjoy, in order to cast an image of a macho tough guy, were the opposite of how he actually lived. As Reyes and Rampell wrote,
     
Although the star of countless Westerns such as John Ford’s 1939 Stagecoach and 1953’s Hondo owned a ranch, the Duke “didn’t particularly like horses and preferred suits and tuxedos to chaps, jeans and boots,” according to his son, Michael Wayne.
     
    The more he demonstrated in his own life that he lacked particular virtues, the more loudly and flamboyantly he claimed to embody them. The more guilt he experienced over his draft dodging, the more loudly he cheered on new wars and attacked war opponents. The more adulterous affairs he carried on and the more broken and hedonistic his personal life became, the more publicly and boisterously he crusaded for America’s traditional moral values.
    And thus John Wayne is indeed the pure and perfect model of today’s right-wing political movement and the Great American Hypocrites who lead it. He was one of the first of the seemingly endless stream of right-wing polemicists who tout the very values and virtues that, in their own lives, they repeatedly prove themselves to be most lacking.
    The principal sins of moralizing tough guys like John Wayne and his heirs in today’s right-wing movement are not mere deceit and hypocrisy—pretending to be something that they plainly are not, or insisting that they believe in values that they repeatedly and deliberately refuse to live by in their own lives. To be sure, those are sins, and reprehensible ones at that.
    But the sinister character represented by John Wayne is worse than merely hypocritical and deceitful. Those who wallow in feelings of inadequate masculinity become quite destructive, incomparably dangerous. Those who lack in their private lives any evidence of warrior courage—from Bill Kristol and Rush Limbaugh to Dick Cheney, Rudy Giuliani, and Mitt Romney—are far more likely to cheer on unnecessary wars and other acts of pointless brutality in order to feel the vicarious sensations of courage and masculine strength that they actually lack in their real lives. And those whose private lives are filled with moral disgraces and wrecked marriages, yet who want to impose “Traditional Morality” on others—the likes of Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Ann Coulter, and John Wayne, and a seemingly endless slew of “Values Voters” leaders—become the most invasive, the most authoritarian of moralizers. Public moralizing against others becomes the only tool available to obscure the profound, grotesque moral failures in their own lives.
    In an astoundingly revealing Wall Street Journal column in October 2001, Peggy Noonan proclaimed that the 9/11 attacks had ushered in the return of the Real Man—of John Wayne manliness:
     
Men are back. A certain style of manliness is once again being honored and celebrated in our country since Sept. 11. You might say it suddenly emerged from the rubble of the past quarter century, and emerged when a certain kind of man came forth to get our great country out of the fix it was in.
    I am speaking of masculine men, men who push things and pull things and haul things and build things, men who charge up the stairs in a hundred pounds of gear and tell everyone else where to go to be safe.
     
    Describing a man who once punched a shark to death after it attacked his wife, Noonan gushed further:
     
I don’t know what the guy did for a living, but he had a very old-fashioned sense of what it is to be a man, and I think that sense is coming back into style because of who saved us on Sept. 11, and that is very good for our country.
    Why?