Big Lies by Joe Conason

By Keith Boykin, in books
Tuesday, September 30 2003, 10:10AM

In today's New York Times, columnist David Brooks attacks the slew of new left-wing authors from Al Franken to Michael Moore for Bush bashing. The best-sellers lists are "dotted with screeds against the president and his supporters," Brooks complains, and he mentions Shrub, Stupid White Men and Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. If that's how he feels, he probably won't like Big Lies by Joe Conason either. Too bad, it's another great book.

Hearkening back to the wonderful 1980s, David Brooks imagines a time when politics was principled. But today, he laments, "politics is no longer a clash of value systems, each of which is in some way valid. It's not a competition between basically well-intentioned people who see the world differently."

Of course it's not, and it never was. Only the hubris of white male privilege would enable someone like Brooks to claim that competing value systems were ever equally valid. When was racism, sexism and homophobia ever valid? But for those like Brooks who are not threatened with the prospect of disenfranchisement from the political process because of their race, gender, sexual orientation or beliefs, it must be easy to play the middle ground.

Brooks claims "the culture wars produced some intellectually serious books because there were principles involved." Easy for him to say. For those of us who have been marginalized from politics by people who have claimed that we are immoral, unpatriotic or inferior, this has never been a mere clash of intellectual values. This has always been a war for our very survival.

That's why we need more writers like Al Franken, Michael Moore and Joe Conason. That's also why we need women and people of color to write these books too. If Brooks read these books honestly, he would make two important distinctions between them and the anti-Clinton books of the 1990s.

First, this new wave of books is supported by facts, not fiction. In the 1990s, the right-wing made outrageous statements, like the claim that Bill Clinton murdered two of his staff members. The left isn't doing that with the anti-Bush books now.

Second, the books on the left are responding to the lies from the right. The liberal writers didn't start the culture wars. They're just fighting back against those who did.

That's exactly why I liked Joe Conason's book Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth. Conason, an accomplished journalist, picks up where Franken leaves off. Both he and Franken take on similar issues, often using similar facts, but Conason adds the credibility of his many years of journalistic experience.

Conason isn't being critical for the sake of being critical either. "I would much prefer an atmosphere that encourages friendship rather than hatred among Americans," Conason writes. "Unfortunately, I don't think there's much chance of that happy outcome until liberals learn to hit back hard," he continues.

And Conason hits hard, with facts. In 10 chapters spread out over 234 pages, Conason takes on the "corporate jet conservatives," the "crony capitalists," the "Mayberry Machiavellis" and the "male cheerleaders" of the GOP.

He hits them on their inconsistency on welfare for the poor versus corporate welfare. He hits them on the contradictions between their public morality and their private lives. And he hits them on the hypocrisy of their military bluster and their lack of military service.

Using carefully documented evidence, Conason disproves the myth of the liberal media and illustrates how Republicans have tokenized the national conversation on race. But his most damning critique is found in his chapter on "crony capitalism."

In an extensively detailed explanation, Conason shows how George W. Bush consistently profited off of his name and his connections throughout his life. From Andover to Yale to Harvard, Bush benefited from his family connections. Then with little money of his own and no experience, Bush got into the oil business, nearly lost his money, was bailed out by his father's friends, became a 2 percent investor in the Texas Rangers and acted like it was his own team.

From there, Bush cashed in on his name to climb his way to the Texas governor's mansion and finally, with the help of his father's Secretary of State and his brother Jeb in Florida, clawed his way to the White House.

Mocking Bush's claim to be an ordinary guy, Conason writes: "George W. is the kind of 'regular guy' who burns through millions of other people's dollars in failed businesses, drinks too much until early middle age, dodges an insider-trading scandal, picks up a major league baseball franchise, and eventually finds himself in the Oval Office as commander in chief of the world's only superpower, thanks to a justice appointed to the Supreme Court by his father."

But despite all the privilege afforded young Bush, he had the shocking arrogance to claim in a 1999 newspaper interview that "oftentimes people are poor because of decisions they make."

And let's not forget the failed war on terrorism either. Conason devotes his entire last chapter to Bush's neglect in the war on terror.

No, David Brooks, this is not mindless Bush bashing. This is good solid reporting. And if the powers-that-be on the right don't like it, they should think about what they did to create it. In the meantime, the rest of us would do well to get this book and study it before the next wave of right-wing lies starts to flow.

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