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Conason & Lyons a Woodward & Bernstein for our times?

This week Salon is running five installments from Joe Conason's new book, Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How it Distorts the Truth. You'll have to watch the noxious Sprint commercial to read them, but it's worth it. Here are parts one, two, three and four. Here too are four great reasons to read all the installments and then run out and buy the book:

America in the 20th century was built on liberal policy, from the Progressive Era through the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the GI Bill, and the Great Society. The modern economy -- a private enterprise system that relies on government safeguards against depression and extreme poverty -- is the legacy of liberal leadership, from Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson. (And more recently Bill Clinton, who erased Republican deficits that were sending the economy into a spiral of recession and began to pay down the national debt.) Liberal policies made America the freest, wealthiest, most successful and most powerful nation in human history. Conservatism in power always threatens to undo that national progress, and is almost always frustrated by the innate decency and democratic instincts of the American people. [from part one]

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. [From part two]

"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."[From part three]

Never before had a municipal authority in Texas been given license to seize the property of a private citizen for the benefit of other private citizens. When a recalcitrant family refused to sell a 13-acre parcel near the stadium site for half its appraised value, their land was condemned and handed over to Bush and his partners. The ensuing lawsuit revealed that prior to passage of the enabling legislation, the Rangers management had planned to wield condemnation as a weapon to drive down the property's price. In a judgment against the city, an outraged jury awarded more than $4 million to the Arlington family whose land had been expropriated. [From part four]

Part five goes up at Salon on Thursday night about 11 pm (CDT). Put me down as one who thinks that Gene Lyons and Joe Conason will be known as the Woodward and Bernstein of the Reagan-Bush era. It's too bad they don't have someone like the Washington Post promoting their findings, but if you read the book, you'd know why that is.

If you're serious about understanding the chasm-like gulf between right and left in this country, time spent reading The Boston Globe's The Angry Season would be well spent (subtitled Outrage is back: Americans of the left and right alike are asking, 'Where are these guys leading us?'). On the left Jim Hightower, on the right Clyde Prestowitz:

HIGHTOWER: People are recognizing that our founding, fundamental values of fairness, justice, and opportunity for all—the very values that define our America—are being shoved aside to create an un-America of plutocracy and autocracy. In my travels, I find widespread dismay, frustration, resentment, and outright anger that no one in power is standing with them against this. The question I hear everywhere, is: ‘‘Where the hell are the Democrats?’’ Well, ask the pundits, if so many people oppose the Bush agenda, why did they vote to give Republicans a sweeping victory—indeed, a ‘‘mandate’’—in last year’s congressional elections? They didn’t. The majority of voters gagged on their choices and didn’t vote all—only 33 percent of those eligible cast a ballot in races for the House. The bottom line is that Bush’s GOP got only 17 percent of eligible voters. Some ‘mandate.’

PRESTOWITZ: Domestically, the administration’s new direction has been even more dramatic and, for traditional conservatives, alarming. Far from being reduced, the size of government has grown larger as spending has been significantly increased to support our imperialist strategy. Passage of the Patriot Act has imposed the greatest constraint on individual American freedoms since the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. In the face of budget projections now deep in the red, further tax cuts may cripple all but the most basic of government functions. Will traditional conservatives sit still for this?

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Long post today (er, well, long quotes anyway), but two recent columns by Bob Herbert and Ted Rall really stand out. Today's New York Times has Herbert on Iraq (readers of my screed yesterday will recognize the gist of where Herbert's coming from), and it's too quotable for me to try and pick a couple for cutting and pasting. A must read that you will agree with.

This week's Rall op-ed piece at Yahoo is a great example of the "good Ted Rall." The good Ted Rall uses his considerable knowledge of Central and Southwest Asia to provide incisive insights into the current situation. This one is on the cell phone situation and how cronyism is resulting in crippled telecommunications in Iraq. [The "bad" Ted Rall? If you read his cartoons, you know what I mean. If you don't, this one's a good example (as opposed to this "classic" Rall cartoon). Every now and then Ted throws out something straight from the pages of vintage Ramparts magazine. It doesn't mean he's wrong, but even this hard-nosed blue collar, socialist-leaning Democrat sometimes finds himself wishing Rall would tone it down a notch. On the other hand, he is wicked funny.]

Posted by Steve Perry at August 21, 2003 11:59 AM

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