When At Wit's End was a string of angry e-mails and chatroom wars on AOL during the Clinton wars [on a l4.4kps modem] and Bartcop was a weekly newsletter, Joe Conason was pretty much all alone on the frontlines of the major Media.
He fought for the truth then and has been fighting for it ever since. He co-wrote the bestseller, "The Hunting of the President", the Bible of Truth about the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy against the Clintons with Gene Lyons. And he has now written a sharp and thoroughly researched tome "Big Lies..The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth"
At 212 pages of text and 33 pages of notes and annotations, it's a quick read. But don't underestimate it's punch by its brevity. Conason explains and illuminates Ten major Right Wing Lies with such brutal clarity that it can take one's breath away.
To a layman like myself, Conason nails Bush's and the GOP's duplicity on their worship of 'The Free Market' like Mary Lou Retton nailed her perfect Vault in the gymnastics in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. Check this out:
The problem isn't that conserviatives are wrong about the fficiency of markets or the creativity of enterprise. It's that they have made false idols of both, usually without acknowledging that markets work best when well regulated, that private enterprise cannot meet every human need, that government has always played a critical role in our economy, and that the profit motive can be socially and environmentally destructive as well as dynamic.
While liberals are often mocked as naive idealists, they are in fact the true realists. Instead of turning capitalism into a pseudoreligion, they see it as it is: a powerful system that requires govenment intervention to temper the business cycle, to protect individuals and communities from abuse by corporate behemoths, and to provide the complex physical, educational, and scientific infrastructure that encourages growth.
Yet there are still deeper contradictions that separate conservative Republicans from their professed ideology. They claim to believe in 'free enterprise,' and many of them sincerely do. BUT THE SYSTEM THAT IS PRACTICED AT THE TOP - BY POLITICIANS, THEIR FAMILIES, FRIENDS, AND CORPORATE BENEFACTORS - WOULD BE MORE APTLY DESCRIBED AS 'CRONY CAPITALISM.' [Emphasis mine.]
Conason goes on to describe Ferdinand Marcos' 'crony capitalism' in the Philippines, and mentions a prominent Republican who worked in Bush I's White House who was a benefactors of his largesse.
But this is only one of many examples Conason fast-edits in this magnificent work. There is no fluff. There are no wasted words; no cute or entertaining anecdotes. Reading this is like reading non-fiction as Hemingway might have written it...terse, to the point, harsh and brutally honest.
Conason puts the hurt to my least favorite harpy, Ann Coulter in a chapter entitled 'Peroxide Paradox: The Blone Misleading the Blind'. After dispatching the anorexic sex-starved bimbo [my paraphrase from David Brock's book] Conason devotes the rest of the chapter dismembering the myth of 'The Liberal Media Bias.'
I could go on about how convincingly Conason busts the Right Wing for their blatant lies and their hypocrisy. And I will. Hell, it's my column and my Site. But, rather than me continuing on a love fest here, I'd rather quote passages from the book and then recommend...nay, DEMAND, that you buy this wonderful and exquisitely readable tome. Keep it on the New York Times' Bestseller List...get it up from #15 to the Top 10. DISPLACE COULTER'S ABOMINATION!!!!!!
From the Chapter "Conservatives protect family values and moral virue, while liberals promote immorality and vice."
That so many right-wingers can still preach about 'family values' and 'declining American morality' without dissolving in laughter is a testament to their mental discipline. No matter how many of the right's virtuecrats are caught committing the sins they claim to comdemn, they continue to pretend that they're lecturing the rest of us from the moral high ground.
Are these bogus moralizers thrying to deceive themselves as well as the rest of us? Or are they simply relying on the willingness of millions of Americans to be duperd? It is remarkable indeed that those trusting herds remain convinced of the moral superiority of conservatism, giving their money to ranting televangelists and their votes to ostentatiously pious politicans. SUCH CREDULOUS FOLK MUST BE UNAWARE OF THE EVIDENCE THAT TRADITIONAL MORALS ARE DECLINING MORE RAPIDLY AND MORE PRECIPITOUSLY ON THE RIGHT-AND IN THE SO-CALLED RED STATES-THAN ANYWHERE ELSE. [Emphasis mine.]
...The more proufoundly immoral a conservative sinner fels, the more loudly he or she will bleat about the immorality of liberals.
..Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham may idolize Phyllis Schlafly, but they aren't known to be models for her 'abstinence education' campaign. Why should they be? The unmarried pundits know that sexual abstinence (like strict sobriety and profound piety) is for the poor rubes who stay home watching the 700 Club, not for urbane young Republicans hanging out in saloons on Capitol Hill and the Uper East Side.
And my favorite quote comes from a GOP insider in Idaho about Helen Cheoweth, a leading Right Wing nutcase Congresswoman who was on the warpath about Clinton's sexual dalliances and pushed for impeachment prior to Lewinsky. She had her own sexual pecadilloes. She was known by all her colleagues in DC and Idaho as being a whore who slept with every man who winked at her...married or not. Her erstwhile GOP colleague as Conason quoted said, "Helen is living proof that you can fuck your brains out."
Ya gotta love these hypocritical scum.
Want some more? How about this from the Chapter on "Faith, Charity, and the Mayberry Machiavellis"
Conason makes me angry when he reveals the true nature and vileness of Bush's phony 'Comapssionate Coservatism'. It's nothing more than 19th Century Dickensonian English misery for the poor packaged in a crooked smile. The basis of Bush's and Karl Rove's CC is traced to Marvin Olasky and his rehashed theological mush called Christian Reconstructionism 'with its idictment of the poor as moral miscreants who are responsible for their own misery...'
The ideology that shapes the political outlook of Bush and Rove as well as Olasky is an unwholesome stew of libertarian economics and religious orthodoxy. It exalts church and corporations over the modern democratic state. It condemns democratic intitiatives to constrain corporate power or regulate economic activity. It defines the wealthy as God's elect, even if, like George W. Bush, they have inherited wealth and power that made their livews easy from the beginning.
Right-wing sages like Olasky and Rove fret constantly that welfare, Medicaid, and food stamps will corrupt generations of the por - but they never seem to worry that inheriting millions of tax-free dollars might encourage idleness, dependency, and indulgence among the children of the rich. Indeed, their ideology brusquely rejects almost any gesture by government to improve the condition of the poor, even when the beneficiaries are the sinless children of churchgoing, hardworking, inner-city families that subsist on the minimum wage, which Olasky believes should be abolished anyway.
A PHILOSPHY WITH THESE CHARACTERISTICS COULD BE CALLED MISERLY, MEAN, MINDLESS, SELF-RIGHTEOUS, RUINOUS, TWISTED, ARCHAIC, ADDLED, ABSURD, SHALLOW, OR STERILE; PERHAPS SOME WOULD CALL IT HARSH OR HARD-HEADED. CERTAINLY SUCH A PHILOSOPHY WOULD QUALIFY AS CONSERVATIVE IN CURRENT PARLANCE. IN MY VIEW, IT SHOULD BE CALLED UN-AMERICAN. TO CALL IT COMPASSIONATE, HOWEVER, IS A PERVERSION OF LANGUAGE AND A POLITCAL FRAUD. [Once again, Emphasis mine.]
Joe Conason is a measured and fearless journalist and an honorable man. He's been a guest on my radio show several times. I respect him like few others. He uses language wisely and judiciously...and when he uses the terms 'un-American' and 'fraud' one does not take them lightly.
Buy this book and remember it in November, 2004.