A Left Coast Book Review - Conservatives Without Conscience

Greetings from the Left Coast! Some weeks ago, my wife and I met with some dear family friends down in Tacoma whom we hadn’t seen socially for quite some time. I made the mistake, before my wife kicked me under the table, of mentioning that I was now blogging, and confessed that my political leanings were “somewhere to the Right of Atilla the Hun,” if I recall my words correctly. I soon learned that their political leanings, um, weren’t. As we parted, they handed me John Dean’s 2006 bestseller, Conservatives Without Conscience, and suggested that I would find it enlightening, as it came from someone who was within the Conservative camp, as it were.

In case you don’t remember John Dean, he was the White House legal counsel to President Richard Nixon when the Watergate scandal broke. The FBI referred to him as the “master manipulator of the cover up.” On November 30, 1973, he pled guilty to obstruction of justice and was sentenced to one to four years in a minimum-security prison. He never served that sentence, however – he instead became a star witness for the prosecution, and was held in a special “safe house,” when he wasn’t working with the Watergate Special Prosecutor and testifying in the trial of other Watergate figures. On January 8, 1975, in return for his cooperation, Judge John Sirica reduced his sentence to time served.

Now, that in itself doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have good ideas, or that we shouldn’t pay attention to what he has to say. He paid his debt to society, and is entitled to make a living like anybody else. Personally, I haven’t been following his career of late, but he has apparently been doing very well for himself writing a series of books that are critical of today’s Republicans in general and the Bush administration in particular. According to Wikipedia, he has frequently been a guest on Keith Olbermann’s MSNBC show, as well as on the Randi Rhodes Show on the Air America radio network. Since I don’t listen to either MSNBC or Air America, I’ll take their word for it…but I will say that those are venues that aren’t known for giving air time to conservatives.

I found the book disappointing, and somewhat difficult to read. Certainly John Dean has some valid beefs against certain self-styled “conservatives.” The allegations leveled at Dean and his wife by Leonard Colodny and Robert Gettlin in their book Silent Coup: The Removal of a President are truly despicable. I also suspect there just may have been some hard feelings toward Dean on the part of the people he helped send to prison. But that’s no excuse for deliberate distortions in his own works.

Dean spends a lot of time in this book talking about the psychological profile of “Authoritarians,” and explaining why, especially if they are “Social Dominators,” it’s dangerous to have them in power. (And I do mean a lot of time – there were times it felt like I was reading a psychology textbook.) What he doesn’t mention, because this is basically a Conservative Republican-bashing book, is that there are plenty of authoritarian personalities on both sides of the political aisle. In fact, it's arguable that an authoritarian personality is what drives most people to seek political office. And the most egregious examples of the suppression of rights these days – particularly the right of free speech – are coming from the left, not the right...but that's another post for another day.

Dean points out several cases of Republicans who were caught violating the law as examples of what he’s talking about. And, indeed, in the cases he mentions, these were people who betrayed the public trust, and got what they deserved. I’ve noticed something interesting, though: In general, when Republican politicians get caught with their hands in the proverbial cookie jar, their own constituents generally vote them out of office. When Democrats get caught, their constituents generally keep re-electing them. Here are just a few examples:

• Democrat Congressman Gerry Studds was censured by the House of Representatives in 1983 for his part in a Congressional page sex scandal. He admitted having a sexual relationship with a 17-year old male congressional page who, while a minor, was of the age of “legal consent” under state law. Studds was re-elected six more times after being censured. He defended his actions as having a “consensual relationship with a young adult.”
• Democrat Congressman William Jefferson was videotaped by the FBI on July 30, 2005, receiving $100,000 in a leather briefcase. On August 3, they raided his home in Washington DC, and found $90,000 wrapped in aluminum foil and stuffed in his freezer. He is alleged to have received over $400,000 in bribes from iGate, Inc., of Louisville, KY. In January, 2006, Brett Pfeffer, a former Jefferson aide who was on trial himself on bribery and conspiracy charges, implicated Jefferson in a corruption scheme involving an Internet company. In May, 2006, Vernon Jackson, the CEO of iGate, admitted to bribery of a public official. According to the Associated Press, the court documents made clear that Jefferson was the public official in question. That same month, Nancy Pelosi, then the House Minority Leader, publicly requested his immediate resignation from the House Ways and Means Committee (the primary tax-writing committee of the House). Jefferson refused. In June, 2006, House Democrats voted 99 to 58 to strip him of the committee assignment. That’s right: 58 other Democrats felt that it was appropriate, in spite of the evidence against him, for him to keep his seat on the committee whose primary responsibility is to figure out how the United States Government is going to fund its operations. Later that year, he was re-elected to his Congressional seat. (In June of 2007, a federal grand jury indicted him on 16 corruption-related charges.)
• Don’t even get me started on Ted Kennedy. Just Google “Chappaquiddick” and go from there.

Had any one of these examples featured a Republican, does anyone doubt that they would have been hounded from office with howls of outrage? But that’s OK. This is a book that was specifically written about the evils of Republicans, not Democrats. I get it. Unfortunately, Dean then goes off the rails and joins the standard chorus of criticism of the Bush administration: Bush is dumb; Cheney is evil; the U.S. tortures terrorist detainees; the pre-war intelligence was manipulated in a deliberate effort justify war in Iraq; we’re in danger of losing our rights because of the War on Terror - but he doesn't cite any hard evidence for any of these allegations. In terms of his intended audience, he's preaching to the choir - they already believe all these things, so evidence isn't required. That clearly can sell a lot of books, but I had hoped for more intellectual honesty from someone like Dean.

John Dean is clearly one of many intellectuals in our nation who live in a theoretical world. He actually seems to think that we shouldn’t be all that concerned about terrorism. After all, as he points out in his book, in 2001, when roughly 3,000 Americans were killed by terrorists, over 700,000 also died from heart disease, nearly 554,000 from cancer, and over 100,000 in various accidents. So, according to Dean, we need to keep the threat in perspective.

Gee, John, too bad you weren’t there at the World Trade Center with a bullhorn. You could have pointed out those statistics to the people who chose to jump out the windows rather than burn to death. I’m sure it would have comforted them on the way down to know that they were such an insignificant proportion of the country's total death toll for the year. (No, I haven’t gotten over 9/11. I never will. And neither should you. And, yes, I do get a little testy when I read or hear things that imply that it really wasn't that big of a deal.)

But the point is, it isn't the federal government's job to protect you from heart disease, cancer, or accidents (with a few obvious exceptions in the latter case, e.g., enforcing workplace safety laws). It is the federal government's job to protect you from people from other countries who want to destroy the nation's economy, bring down our government, and kill you. In fact, one could argue that this is the most important job the government has!

Dean also quotes Jim Harper of the Cato Institute, who compares the risk of terrorist attack to the Cold War, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union “drew within a few figurative seconds of midnight” in their nuclear stalemate. We “didn’t throw out the rulebook” then, and we shouldn’t do so now, either. This is a staggering display of ignorance of the enemy we face today. The U.S. and the Soviet Union avoided nuclear holocaust largely through the doctrine of “Mutually Assured Destruction” – the assurance that neither nation would be able to survive once the missiles started to fly. But the terrorists don’t have a nation to worry about. And they frankly don’t care how many people die in their pursuit of jihad. If they could get their hands on a nuclear weapon, and somehow get it into the U.S., they would use it without a moment’s concern about possible repercussions.

John Dean, and others like him, don’t really understand this. In their theoretical world, we shouldn’t ever use force unless it’s first used against us. Carried to its logical conclusion, that means they are willing to accept the possibility that we could lose an American city to a terrorist attack rather than take any kind of pre-emptive action to take the terrorists out before they have the chance to bring the fight back to our soil - but they don't see it that way, because they simply don’t take the threat seriously. And if you live in, say, a major port city that handles a lot of container freight, as my Tacoma friends do, that should worry you a lot more than whether we’re using coerced interrogation methods on detainees in Guantanamo.

Thanks for listening.