Strong moral values, decency and honesty: Conservatives long ago declared these ideals essential to their belief system, achieving political ascendancy with promises of restoring honor to a government they view as tainted by liberal immorality and excess.
But there remains one question: What happened?
Barely a year into Bush’s second term, the American political landscape is brimming with blatant examples of conservative deceit, dishonesty, cronyism and hypocrisy.
Foremost among these examples is the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney’s right-hand man, Lewis Libby, who faces charges of perjury and making false statements before a grand jury. Not that this is cause for embarrassment among conservatives, indeed, many are relieved, pointing out that Libby is in trouble “only” for lying. It seems conservative standards have slipped a bit.
Of course, the Libby indictment is but the tip of the beast’s horn. The larger case is about a vengeful administration bent on destroying an undercover CIA agent’s career by leaking her name because her husband, also a CIA agent, challenged shoddy evidence buttressing the case for war in Iraq.
But forget for a moment the value of simple honesty, or even the importance of not undermining your own nation’s intelligence services. What about that conservative mantra of “respecting the culture of life” invoked in abortion debates? Since the war was based on lies and exaggerations, can anyone seriously claim that this administration showed even the slightest respect for the lives of the 2,000 American soldiers and countless Iraqi civilians now lost to its horrors?
Most intriguing, this “culture of life” champions life when it does not yet exist and abandons it when it does.
Surely, however, the Republican Party can redeem itself through its philosophy of Christian compassion. Congressional testimony two weeks ago revealed that, when the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) sole (and accidental) representative in New Orleans found thousands of Americans stranded without food or shelter, he issued a desperate call for help to FEMA chief Michael Brown. Brown’s aide replied several hours later with the following example of compassionate conservatism in action: “It is very important that time is allowed for Mr. Brown to eat dinner.” Marie Antoinette would have been impressed.
Equally impressive is the Republican Party’s idea of taking responsibility and not blaming others “as those lazy liberals are wont to do.” Take the case of Tom Delay, the House majority leader who was indicted for pouring corporate money into Texas’ 2002 state elections. Even though he has been censured three times in 2004 by the bipartisan House Ethics Committee, he views the indictment as a kind of vast, left-wing conspiracy, calling the prosecutor “an unabashed partisan zealot.”
It goes without saying that Republican contrition for any of the outrages outlined above is unlikely; the arsonists are running the firehouse, and they take great pride in fanning the flames.
We would be sorely remiss, however, if we ignored the behavior of the Democrats in this affair. They have sat on their fire hoses and idled their fire engines on key issues, enabling the conservative conflagration. Particularly on the issue of the war, to which much else is connected, it was the “liberal” New York Times and its superstar pseudo-journalist Judith Miller who led the war drive.
Therefore, while conservative wrongdoing is obvious, liberals must take a long, hard look at their own party. They, too, must ask the question: What happened?
– M. Junaid Alam is a senior journalism major.
