Free Republic

Sen. John Kerry’s 2004 presidential hopes were sunk when he buckled under to “authoritarian” conservatives hellbent on smearing his military record as part of a larger “proto-facist” movement, says a former top White House aide whose testimony helped sink Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal. John Dean, a Republican who served as Nixon’s top counsel, said Kerry slipped up during the 2004 campaign against President Bush by not suing the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth when they published a book calling into question the Bay State senator’s Vietnam service. “What most surprised me is that Kerry never did anything with...

Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly In his seventh book, Dean, the former Nixon legal counsel whom the FBI has called the "master manipulator" of the Watergate coverup, weighs in with a rebuke to Christian fundamentalists and other right-wing hard-liners. A self-described Goldwater conservative (indeed, Goldwater had planned to collaborate on this book before his death), he rails against the influence of social conservatives and neoconservatives within his party. Suffused with bitterness stemming from the controversies in which he has been embroiled, Dean's book paints a thin social science veneer over a litany of mostly ad hominem complaints. Purporting to...

The leftists are in such a funk with their string of electoral losses over the past few years that they are desperately searching for their political Holy Grail that will show them how to win again or at least explain why they are constantly losing. Thus we have a plethora of books such as by George Lackoff explaining that the real reason the Democrats keep losing is that they have lost control of the use of the language and need to "frame" the debates differently. This explains why we have constant yakety-yak lately about "framing." And now we have...