Joe Conason

As regular readers of this space know, I am forever trying to read and appreciate right wing, conservative viewpoints. But I keep running into irrationality, lies, and malfeasance that turns me right off. It has always astounded me that conservative writers and politicians are of such obviously low quality. The same goes for political candidates. But I keep trying, hoping to find a standard-bearer I can refer to and rely on for sound analysis and balance to the noise from the left. But then, show more Joe Conason showed up with his new book, The Longest Con.

Conason’s book traces the grifters of the Republican party from the early days in the Nixon administration, through outright theft and scams of it principals in the Reagan era, to the Trump era, where the president himself is the biggest grifter, scammer, liar and con artist of all. Ever. He surrounds himself with likeminded scammers, and encourages those down the line to feel free to rip off the government and the populace. It makes him proud of his choices. The grift is stunning in its vastness.

For some reason, when Republicans take power, they feel it gives them carte blanche to drain the coffers of the government. It could be bogus contracts, luxury vacations, meals and flights, kickbacks from contractors, or posing as if they had access to the highest reaches of government. It started embedding itself in the 1970s, and has never looked back, getting worse with every Republican administration. Hating government somehow means it is justifiable to steal as much as humanly possible from it. And wear it openly and proudly.

Government is one fatted calf. The other is Republicans themselves. Conason has an endless list of scams that Republicans bilk each other with, from overpriced gold coins to kitschy junk products (t shirts, caps, sneakers, commemorative “coins”, NFTs….). A growing trend is abusing religion, claiming to be of the faith in order to rip off the evangelicals. He goes on at tremendous length of how the evangelicals themselves rip each other off, claiming to be guided by God in person, proffering get rich quick investment funds, bilking the poor from their weekend religious tv and radio programs, getting the poor to tithe ten percent of their earnings for a place in God’s favor, which goes straight to yachts, condos and private planes. The sex and finance scandals that bring them down (Hargis, Bakker, Falwell, et al. are thoroughly profiled here) never seem to cast suspicion on the rest, who say and do the same things. And who get filthy rich off the modest true believers.

Conason found it hadn’t changed much over the decades: “What remained consistent in each succeeding variation was the reliance on exaggeration, deception, and fabrication, frequently permeated with racial apprehension and hostility, as well as a remorseless drive to squeeze every penny from the dupes.”

As the book comes closer to today, it becomes an all-Trump story. The entire last third of the book is just the Trump administration. There is as much grift in the Trump circles as in the history of it. Half his cabinet resigned in corruption scandals that made the worst ever cabinet in history (Ulysses S. Grant’s) seem like a choir of angels. The corruption of the president ($1.6B), Jared Kushner ($3B) and Ivanka Trump ($.6B) totals more than the GDP of many countries. Nothing in American history has ever even come close.

Trump pulled corrupt grifters like Roger Stone and Paul Manafort out of the dust of history to bilk the rubes once again. They originally ripped off foreign potentates and industrial bigwigs for millions in the Reagan era by claiming to be consultants with direct access to him. They lived high, and delivered nothing. Trump gave them free reign to try new scams, getting rich once again, and offering them pardons from prison as he left.

Conason thinks Trump learned from Roy Cohn, who cut his teeth with the fraudulent Senator Joe McCarthy and his communists-under-every-bed campaign. Cohn, isolated and hated, became a loud, obnoxious fighter for the less than pure, bullying his way to ever bigger paydays, and to hell with everyone. Conason thinks Trump learned at the feet of the master – never give in, never apologize for anything, double down instead, and fight everything loudly, posing as the victim. In a splendid display of his loyalty only to himself, Cohn went back and ripped off the retired Senator McCarthy himself, the kind of story that would make Donald Trump worship at his feet. Trump has called for a Roy Cohn in some of his innumerable, shall we say, difficulties. Alas, all he can find is Alina Habbas.

The book reaches back to the scams of the extreme right, always looking for a foothold in legit society. He examines the scams of the John Birch Society, the NRA, radio preachers, conspiracies about globalists, the deep state, and of course McCarthy. But it was Nixon’s administration that gave them freedom to operate and a home in the Republican party. This is when the open hate and extreme right factions began to attach themselves to the GOP. The rot led to the vice-president resigning in shame, followed by the president himself, by which act the replacement VP, Gerald Ford, suddenly found himself president. And the first thing he did was pardon Nixon. This is the model for Trump’s government.

But the Nixon administration was a babe in the woods, where a handful of operatives tooled around undermining the Democrats. In the next Republican regime, the Reagan administration, 138 officials were nabbed by the Justice Dept. for misconduct or criminal activities, right up to the attorney general, who accepted bribes to lobby the government from his exalted position in the cabinet. And saw nothing wrong with that. Today, we have Trump stealing dozens of cases of top secret documents and seeing nothing wrong with keeping them and storing them in a bathroom at his home, a club with hundreds of members and guests wandering about.

In the 1970s, direct mail came into fashion, changing the whole fundraising dynamic. Rather than beg or cajole, rather than tug at their heartstrings, marketers succeeded by being infuriating. They sought to enrage recipients with threats to their freedom, health, wealth and safety. But especially freedom. Communists were everywhere. They were taking over education, local government and invading your privacy. Immigrants, the Council on Foreign Relations, non-Christians, homosexuals, liberals, civil servants, the UN – absolutely anything could be used to aggravate the mailing list. People sent in money, and the marketers basically kept it, spending little or even none of it helping candidates or causes they espoused in the letters. The mailing list became the most prized possession one could hope for. It was the ticket to untold wealth, courtesy of tetchy, fearful conservatives nationwide.

Conason profiles Richard Viguerie, the man who discovered it all. At his peak, he controlled 300 mailing lists, churning out mailers 24/7, if not for clients then just for his own income. Conservatives are a gold mine for grifters.

And so with Donald Trump, constantly milking his court dates and setbacks for people to send him – a billionaire – more of what little money they have. He also did it with his so-called university, the sole goal of which was to sell more and more courses to those registered. It was not accredited, offered no real degrees, provided no education and no insights students couldn’t have found for themselves in bookstores and libraries. He did it with his “charity”, which provided him with free money. And he does it with every judicial setback he undergoes – and they are practically weekly now.

As for his book, The Art of the Deal, it is entirely fiction, written by ghostwriter Tony Schwartz, who never thought it would go anywhere. That it was just a frivolous vanity publication. But Schwartz is spending the rest of his life downplaying the monster he created. Trump, Schwartz and the publisher say, provided not one word for that book. Schwartz claims it should be recategorized as fiction and should be titled The Sociopath.

The extraordinarily low quality of Republicans came home to roost with John McCain, whose team selected Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska for VP, before it vetted her. Because the Republican party was not out to find a quality VP, but a young woman VP to balance John McCain’s elderly male hero image. She knew no history, no law, no processes. She had never heard of the Federal Reserve, didn’t know there were two world wars, or two Koreas. She thought Africa was a country. Nonetheless, she instantly acquired a cult following as a “hockey mom”, and keeps millions of dollars they send her PAC for her to spend as she pleases. If McCain had won and then developed brain cancer and died as he did, it is unimaginable what would have become of the United States under Sarah Palin. But she put a stop to that possibility every time she spoke, which was way too often. McCain’s campaign was dead on arrival.

In private life, Trump aligns himself with criminals and fugitives for his partnerships. During the Financial Crisis, his son Eric proudly announced that The Trump Organization had no problems with finances, because all its funding came from Russia. He did not add that it was because no US banks would have him as a client. Deutsche Bank was the last of a long line of banking regrets, despite Trump’s court bleatings that no banks were harmed by him or ever complained about him. For Conason, Trump is “the transmogrification of the American Right into a shameless hustle, devoid of principle and fully devoted to exploitation.”

Nothing in The Longest Con is new. Conason used readily available public sources to put this history together. He made no discoveries that he would have to back up with his own sources. He did not have to seek out grizzled historians to flesh out the scams. This is just the way the Republican party rolls now. It no longer even bothers with a platform. It is just about hate and fear and the money they can bring in. And that is possibly the most frightening fact of all.

David Wineberg show less

Apolitical all my life, the current US election has me riveted by its amazing nastiness. The public ignorance of their own political system and how it works and is being used is astounding. This book showed even more how dirty US politics has been for a long time. Everyone has an ax to grind. Women wanting money and fame. Men wanting money and revenge. Political rivals hiring spies to dig up dirt and taking a molehill and with twists and embellishments and paid liars turning it into a show more mountain. Then it takes more investigation and public money to dig through the lies to find the nugget of truth that turns out to be meaningless. People lying under oath and getting away with it unless you are the target of the lies and you lie to protect yourself or your family...you end up the loser. The journalists on radio, television, news magazines, and trash tabloids all printing lies all over the country for ratings. Media corporations making profits out of destroying their own country's image. Huge amounts of tax payer money used to investigate the life of a politician, looking for anything that would pull him down, not for truth but for political gain of one party over another. All this with absolutely no regard for the constitution or for the democracy of the country. All this with absolutely no regard for the honor of the office of the Presidency. Misinformation is still being spread because the truth is lodged in piles of documents never seen by the public and unread by journalists who should be mining them for truth. The lies printed, and since disproved legally, are what is remembered and constantly reiterated. It is nauseating reading no matter what side of the political fence you are standing on...if you have any interest at all in honest government. I read all of Linda Tripp's machinations and illegal taping and lies in this book and looked her up on the internet to find out what ever happened to her, only to read a new interview in January of 2016 filled with more vituperative lies about Clinton. New scurrilous information mixed in with repetition of old lies that have been exposed a long time ago. The media has given this woman, already proved to be a liar and tainted, a voice to add her muck to an already mucky campaign. This book ends with the Lewinsky scandal and here so many years later she is embellishing her story and given a platform to do it. How can it not be suspicious and manipulative? Soul destroying information on how our trusted public officials are corrupted. show less

Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel It Can't Happen Here envisaged a right-wing populist president, advised by a cunning political strategist and backed by a cynical alliance of religious fundamentalists and corporations, who uses security threats to consolidate dictatorial powers, destroy civil liberties and establish folksy fascism. This is a virtual blueprint for the current Bush administration, a "corrupt and authoritarian ruling clique" that accords the president "the prerogatives of a king," show more argues political columnist Conason (Big Lies) in this lively, if overwrought, j'accuse. He surveys a long list of what he sees as Bush administration affronts to freedom and democracy: military tribunals, torture, warrantless wiretapping, politically motivated terrorism alerts, a war based on fraudulent pretexts, the Abramoff scandals, the handover of policy making to business interests and Christian zealots, tight secrecy coupled with a dissemination of propaganda through the right-wing media and a lawless contempt for constitutional constraints on the presidency. His indictment often hits home, but it's broad and indiscriminate, treating biased journalism, religion-tinged politics and lobbying scandals as signs of creeping fascism rather than age-old commonplaces of democracy. Conason delivers his usual cogent, hard-hitting critique of Republican misdeeds, but his insinuations of authoritarianism, coming just as the Republicans have been voted out of power in Congress, seem badly ti show less

Conanson's point is well taken: it can happen here. It is happening here, as he ably documents. Ironically, I think the reason I felt this book was somewhat scattershot and needed a tighter focus on some of the more urgent issues, is that Conanson tried to touch on the vast range of the Bush Administration's corruption and mendacity; the sheer volume of scandalous misconduct meant a description of what scurried out each time a rock was turned over had to be brief in order to accommodate a show more description of the next rock. show less