The GOP's Loyalty Fetish

[Guest guest]

The GOP's Loyalty Fetish

Paul Waldman

February 22, 2006

 

Paul Waldman is a senior fellow at Media Matters for

America. His next book, Being Right is Not Enough:

What Progressives Can Learn From Conservative Success,

will be released in the spring by John Wiley & Sons.

 

The winding down of L’Affaire Birdshot left me

wondering: Just who do you have to shoot around here

to get conservatives to stop standing by you, anyway?

 

In a scene straight out of China’s Cultural

Revolution, Harry Whittington stepped before the

cameras to express his sympathy for the suffering he

had caused Dick Cheney by getting in the way of

Cheney’s gun—looking, as he apparently did, like a

6-foot-tall quail clad in blaze orange. " My family and

I are deeply sorry for everything Vice President

Cheney and his family have had to deal with,” he said.

 

He wouldn’t be the last Republican to lament the

suffering of Dick Cheney. By a strange coincidence,

Whittington’s comments fit in perfectly with the

latest line from the Cheney camp: the vice president,

we are told, was just heartbroken by the incident.

Mary Matalin testified that Cheney was so broken up he

couldn’t even contribute to his own spin strategy,

consumed as he was with anguish over Whittington’s

well-being. “And I said, O.K., this guy is going to be

worthless about getting me what I need to help him

here,” Matalin said. " He's so Harry-centric. " Former

Republican senator and fellow Wyomingan Alan Simpson

told Fox News, “He probably went home that day when he

got back to Lynn and probably put his head down on her

shoulder and cried.” Dick Cheney, sensitive new-age

guy—who knew?

 

But it’s a little hard to believe that Dick Cheney is

consumed by regret. As the Daily Show’s Rob Corddry

put it, “While the quail turned out to be a

78-year-old man, even knowing that today, Mr. Cheney

insists he still would have shot Mr. Whittington in

the face.”

 

Perhaps Cheney will now be in line for the Medal of

Freedom for his itchy trigger finger, just as Tommy

Franks, Paul Bremer and George “Slam Dunk” Tenet

received theirs for the bungling of the Iraq war and

occupation. In today’s political world, dominated as

it is by stand-by-your-man conservatives, there are

few sins that will get one banished from the field of

battle. Indeed, Cheney could probably strangle a puppy

at the next State of the Union and still be defended

on the right. All manner of misdeeds can be forgiven,

as long as one rule is followed: keep firing away at

liberals and Democrats, and you’re all right with us.

 

Other examples aren’t hard to find. Consider Dick

Morris. When his political consulting career flamed

out after it was revealed he let a prostitute listen

in on his phone conversations with the president in

between toe-sucking sessions, he knew just what to do:

become a professional Hillary-hater. No matter what

was in his past, he’d be embraced by the right, with a

New York Post column and a regular gig on Fox News the

inevitable rewards.

 

Morris' consulting career was marked by rampaging

stupidity punctuated by occasional flashes of

strategic brilliance. He has become without a doubt

America’s worst political prognosticator—yet he

remains a media mainstay. Among his classic

predictions was that Jeanine Pirro, whose brief

candidacy was among the most comically inept in the

history of New York state, was such a strong candidate

that Hillary Clinton might just think “the better of

it and drop out of the race.” He also predicted that

Hillary would force John Kerry to make her his running

mate—after he predicted that Wesley Clark was a

stalking horse for a Clinton candidacy in 2004 (don’t

ask how that was supposed to work).

 

But it isn’t only pundits who get to wipe their sins

clean. Take the notorious John Lott, the right’s most

prominent scholarly con artist. A few of the entries

on Lott’s lengthy rap sheet give the taste of his

modus operandi . He claims he conducted a survey on

gun use showing that American gun owners are chasing

off would-be home invaders simply by brandishing their

weapons with remarkable frequency. The unusual results

cannot be checked, since he claims they disappeared in

a hard drive crash. After being criticized, Lott

created an Internet persona (“Mary Rosh”) so that he

could praise his own work, teaching abilities and

integrity to the heavens on discussion groups; when a

blogger caught him with a little IP-address sleuthing,

Lott lied about it before finally coming clean.

 

What is remarkable about John Lott isn’t that he

exists, but that despite being exposed more than once

as a fraud, he continues to serve as a resident

scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and

conservatives continue to cite and praise his work

(and for some inexplicable reason, the Los Angeles

Times continues to regularly publish Lott’s op-eds).

 

Of course, neither Lott nor Morris has actually been

convicted of a felony, which you can’t say about media

stars G. Gordon Liddy and Oliver North, neither of

whom let a little thing like the law get in the way of

their agendas. North’s co-conspirators John Poindexter

and Elliot Abrams were given positions in George W.

Bush’s administration. And Rush Limbaugh apparently

sent his housekeeper out to procure drugs for

him—proving himself to be one heck of a stand-up

guy—yet didn’t see any decline in his audience.

 

But while such misbehavior is tolerated—at times even

celebrated—the one thing Republicans cannot abide is

any deviation from partisan cheerleading. Contrast

John Lott with Bruce Bartlett, a well-regarded

conservative thinker, who was fired from his

think-tank job because he wrote a book criticizing

George W. Bush as insufficiently devoted to the

conservative goals of Ronald Reagan. No right-wing

think tank will touch Bartlett, despite his long

history of devotion to the conservative cause.

Meanwhile Lott maintains a cushy sinecure at AEI—one

of the right’s premier think-tanks. Lott’s sins were

lapses in ethics, while Bartlett’s sin was

insufficient partisanship. Bartlett became a victim of

what blogger Glenn Greenwald recently described as

“authoritarian cultism,” the decomposition of

contemporary American conservatism into a simple

belief in the absolute and perfect authority of George

W. Bush.

 

This is not to say that the left is completely immune

from this kind of devotion to partisanship over

ideology. But with a couple of high-profile exceptions

like the Clinton impeachment—a sui generis case if

ever there was one—when a Democrat gets caught doing

something wrong, he or she is far more likely to be

told to get out of town. Whether this is a reflection

of high ethical standards or simple political

calculation, it nonetheless remains true that there

are few characters like Lott, Morris, North or Liddy

on the left—individuals who are enthusiastically given

prominent positions and megaphones despite their shady

past.

 

It is well known that the Bush family prizes loyalty

above all else—recall that George W.’s official role

on his father’s 1988 presidential campaign was

“loyalty monitor. " Loyalty is a fine quality. There

are some kinds of misbehavior, however, that one would

think are beyond the pale. But when the right runs the

show, as long as you still support the team, you can

stick around. It takes a lot more than academic fraud,

lying to Congress or a penchant for prostitutes—or

shooting a guy in the face—to get you kicked out of

the game.

 

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/02/22/the_gops_loyalty_fetish.php