Tonight I went to a book talk by John Dean, President Nixon's White House counsel. It is pretty common knowledge that Dean has gone a bit weird in recent years (perhaps he's still going through a Watergate catharsis?) and has turned into one of these people who get lots of media attention simply because they constantly criticize their old party and friends.
I wouldn't normally have gone to this event because Dean's shtick is predictable and stale. But since arriving in Washington, I have been noticing some serious unease within conservative ranks at the state of the Republican Party, the Bush administration and where things are headed. People feel the party has lost its way. Perhaps its just a symptom of being in control of everything for too long, but I am encoutering a lot of discouraged and pessimistic people.
Dean's new book, Conservatives Without Conscience, is supposed to chronicle the "hijacking" of the Republican Party by the "hard right." (Interestingly, Dean claims he was going to co-write this book with the late great Sen. Barry Goldwater, but he died, making that impossible.)
I wasn't expecting much from this talk, and it proved even worse than I thought. Dean started rambling on about how he has studied personality tests and claims to be able to classify pople like Scooter Libby in the same "category" as Hitler, that Bush is leading America straight down the road to fascism, and so forth. He went on and on making silly statements like this. Anyway, don't waste your time or money on this hackneyed garbage. Nothing new here.
# posted by Adam Daifallah : 12:10 AM
