I heard Joe Conason in Berkeley Saturday evening talking about Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth. As one might guess from the title his book is unapologetically liberal and partisan.
However, the book is also proof that a journalist can be both partisan and professional. Conason is one of those I would call a partisan with integrity. Which means Big Lies would also be a good one for conservatives to wrestle with.
In his brief prepared presentation, he discussed the strategy that Bush's political guru Karl Rove announced to Republicans, of stressing national security as the key partisan advantage of the Republicans. And the efforts that flow from it to paint the Democrats as unpatriotic.
Conason is a keen observer of political propaganda. I've been using a term on this Weblog, "stigmatizing dissent," that I picked up from one of his articles, and which he also used Saturday evening. I thought it must have been fun for him to present the book in a setting like Berkeley, where liberals are the more conservative portion of the population. And, sure enough, he took some flak from some in the crowd for being too conservative.
He thinks it's very important for the Democrats to have a tough dove like Wesley Clark or John Kerry on the Presidential ticket in 2004 to counter Republican efforts to define patriotism as a partisan virtue. He also cited with approval an article from last week by Max Cleland, a Vietnam veteran who lost three limbs in the war and lost his Georgia Senate seat in 2002 to a Republican who attacked his patriotism. The Cleland quote to which Conason referred was at the end of an article about how Iraq is starting to look like Vietnam: "Welcome to Vietnam, Mr. President. Sorry you didn't go when you had the chance."
(Cont. in Part 2)
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