Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How it Distorts the Truth

CONASON: Well, as far as I can tell, the Republicans, at least on Capitol Hill, are far more immoral, by their own standards, than the Democrats are. I have a list in the book -- I go through members of Congress on the Republican side, and other conservatives, because you mention Gingrich being kind of an outstanding example of people who practice the opposite of what they preach. I would challenge any of them to find me a list that long of Democrats who've done the same thing. They won't be able to. And the reason is that the Democrats are more tolerant of human frailty in the first place. This is why they found it easier to forgive Clinton his bad behavior in his marriage.

I don't want to be perceived as saying that all conservatives or all Republicans are liars. I use those terms in the book in a somewhat general way to express what their movement is doing. There are certainly honest conservatives and honest Republicans. But when it comes to morality, they have been promoting themselves on the basis of the lie that they are morally superior in some way to their opponents. And that’s just demonstrably false.

I actually don't think it’s the job of the Democrats to go out and attack any individual Republican’s morality. I actually think it’s the job of the media to measure whether these kinds of allegations by one political party against another have any validity and how much hypocrisy is involved. That’s the function of a free press. Again and again, the mainstream media, and what I call the commanding heights of broadcast and print media in this country, have failed to do that job. They have let the Republicans get away with this stuff. They’ve let the Christian Coalition get away with it. The history of the religious right and the conservative movement in this country is rife with the most grotesque hypocrisy in recent years. And they’ve been allowed to basically have it reported only in the most glancing way which permits them to continue to do the same thing. If the truth about them were told as I tell it in the book, and most people knew that, they would never be able to say any of this again.

I mean, Bush is a patrician. He’s from a nice family with a lot of money and some kind of social background. Karl Rove is a sort of lower middle-class guy who never went to college. Of course he’s going to carry the garbage out. This is a division of labor in American society; it's perfectly reflected in that relationship.

BUZZFLASH: Let me ask a question concerning what one might call celebrity pundit journalism. We have people now like Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter,etc. What makes Bill O’Reilly an expert on anything? But on what basis do they have any value to impart that opinion to the American public, other than that they’re entertainers?

CONASON: None, as far as I can tell -– I mean that honestly. I don't know that Bill O’Reilly knows anything about anything. His remarks about the war struck me as the kind of thing that would be said by some inebriated idiot on a barstool: Let’s bomb ‘em. That sort of kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out type of thing that some idiot says who’s stumbling along in the gutter. Read the stuff that he said. And I have to tell you it astonished me that this is somebody who is put forward as an authority. It’s a joke.

All the goals that the founders had for the United States are not ideas that contemporary so-called conservatives are much interested in. I’ll tell you what they’re interested in: They’re interested in achieving their own power, in amassing their own wealth, in protecting themselves -- and their interests -- against the interests of the majority. Those are the goals of the leaders of the movement that now calls itself conservatism. And it has very little to do with American traditions and American ideals.