Here's a sample of Conason's case exposing rampant right wing hypocrisy entitled "Male Cheerleaders and Chicken Hawks:"
"Conservatives truly love America and support the armed forces, while liberals are unpatriotic draft dodgers."
Of all the pernicious claptrap emitted by right-wing propagandists, none is more offensive than smearing liberals and Democrats as unpatriotic. The portrayal of a liberal elite that despises its own country has allowed conservatives to appropriate the flag, the national anthem, and other national symbols - the heritage of every American - as their movement's private property, and to misuse those symbols for narrow partisan purposes. To the extremists, anyone who doesn't pledge allegiance to the Republican platform is a "traitor."
Rank-and-file reactionaries out in the red-state hinterland may believe this tripe, but the Republican insiders know better. Living in major cities like New York and Washington, they can't avoid knowing liberals who have proudly served in the military, revere the Constitution and the flag, and share the values of liberty and democracy - who are, indeed, just as patriotic as any conservative. That knowledge only makes their promotion of this slanderous myth more shameful.
Like so much other rightist cant, "liberals hate America" is a slogan designed to confuse and inflame the ignorant. - Joe Conason
Here are excerpts from a Review in the Chicago Sun-Times by William O'Rourke from August 17, 2003:
It is now a truism that there is no liberal equivalent of Rush Limbaugh broadcasting progressive commentary across the radio airwaves; at least, no liberal with Limbaugh's vast national audience. Likewise, in the world of books, there is no liberal Limbaugh, or, for that matter, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage and a half-dozen other right-wing polemical authors of the last decade whose anti-Clinton, anti-liberal rants have hit best-seller lists.
Indeed, one of the rare "liberal" writers to reach those sales figures is David Brock, whose book Blinded by the Right is an apology for once having been a right-wing, best-selling author. These conservative writers are not the muckrakers of the early 1900s, so many Ida Tarbells going after the oil trusts. No, they are mudslingers, chiefly partisan ideologues who do a type of reverse PR....
But Joe Conason is straight out of the liberal muckraker tradition, a journalist (not a radio personality, a filmmaker, an actor, etc.) who sets out to expose corruption in big business and government. And unlike Moore and Franken, Conason doesn't heap on humor and exaggeration to make his points. He deplores the "spiteful, malignant discourse that became so common during the Clinton era..."
Big Lies is being marketed as a corrective to all the successful right-wing attack books of the last few years. It is that, but it also is a rigorous and devastating portrait of the last three Republican administrations and the "crony capitalism" they have supported and encouraged.
Conason writes for the New York Observer and Salon.com and is the co-author of The Hunting of the President, an account of the hounding of the Clintons by a cadre of radical Republicans who considered Bill Clinton an illegitimate president. In Big Lies, Conason takes on the reigning conventional wisdom preached by right-wing media publicists.
Conason's counter-claims are not the sort that can be shouted out as sound bites on a TV talk show. They need the quiet patience of print, and his book comes armored with 18 pages of notes and sources. Even those familiar with the history Conason recounts will be freshly appalled seeing it all put down in one place. For liberals who do want to shout on TV, Big Lies will be an indispensable reference.
Conason begins by comparing "Limousine Liberals and Corporate Jet Conservatives." Conason writes, "Bush is a modern master of pseudopopulist style. What that style blurs is the profound Republican cynicism toward the same people he embraces and cajoles." Though Conason thoroughly rakes over Enron and the Bushes' dealings with Ken Lay, he also describes earlier, relevant examples.
Conason quotes David Stockman, Ronald Reagan's budget director, as describing Reagan's broad tax cuts as a "Trojan horse" to reduce the top income tax rate paid by the wealthiest families.
"Working families saw their tax burden continue to rise, while the rich enjoyed tax breaks on capital gains, personal investments, estates, depreciation, and profits. Under Reagan's plan, a family earning $30,000 a year would suffer a slight increase in taxes, while a family with an annual income of $200,000 would enjoy a cut of 10 percent. There were even some special tax breaks for the owners of oil leases." Sound familiar?
The chapter on the Republicans' "family values" reads as if it was torn from the pages of the '50s-era expose of sin and sinners in the nation's capital, Washington Confidential.
Conason replays the Clinton-era scandals and the sorry record of Clinton's chief antagonists in Congress, but he also fills in various sideshows, like the GOP homosexual-baiting campaign against Tom Foley, the Democratic speaker of the House (1989-'95), launched by Newt Gingrich's lieutenants. Conason reports, "When openly gay Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts warned that he would begin outing gay Republicans if the attacks on Foley continued, they ended overnight."
By chapter's end, the amount of Republican hypocrisy exposed would choke an elephant. (And Conason's book stops before morality-booster William Bennett's immoderate gambling habit was in the news.)
Likewise, Conason's chapter on race matters is an ignominious parade of Republican racial demagoguery and continuing opposition to, among other things, the Voting Rights Act: "To anyone familiar with this shabby history, the inescapable question is not why more minorities don't flock to conservatism and vote Republican. The wonder is why any would at all."
Conason demonstrates that Sen. Trent Lott's recent disgrace was no exception, but more or less the rule. Two important and damning chapters are those on "crony capitalism" and the canard that "conservatives are tough on terrorism, while liberal Democrats are soft."
Conason points out that the term crony capitalism "originated under the kleptocratic regime of Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos" and "was once reserved for corrupt economic systems in developing or formerly Communist countries."
He shows where the worlds of crony capitalism and terrorism cross and, for the Bush family, they come together most vividly in Saudi Arabia, via Iran-contra. And Conason debunks the myth that Bill Clinton was more concerned with Monica Lewinsky than he was with Osama bin Laden. Don't take my word for it--look to Conason's book.
Whether Big Lies ascends to the bestseller list is another question altogether. Conason is not preaching to the choir; he hopes to reach the unconverted. The teeming audience out there for the right-wing attack books may simply ignore this volume, not wanting to know.
One difference between liberals and conservatives will likely show itself besides the fact that liberals are to thank for promoting freedom of speech laws that allow books by Coulter et al. to be published. Conservatives often want to silence those they oppose.
Liberals do read books that contain ideas and analysis they disagree with. Readers of right-wing attack books rarely do. Here's a case where I'd be happy to be proved wrong.
Joe Conason is a must read for anyone who wants to know what's really going on in politics, the media, and America today.
