Read Glenn Greenwald's "Great American Hypocrites"

Glenn Greenwald's new book "Great American Hypocrites" very effectively argues a number of the kinds of things I have proposed in earlier posts to this blog. While he is primarily focused on the Republican Party's hypocrisy this underlines how those who claim to be "conservative" are not. Here is how he puts it on p. 237:

There has been a long line of decidedly unconservative actions by the Bush administration that have been almost uniformly cheered on by the right wing--from exploding discretionary domestic spending to record deficits, to an emergency convening of the federal government to intervene in one woman's end-of-life decisions, to attempts to federalize marriage and medical laws--all of which could not be any more alien to what has been meant by conservatism for the past forty years.

Greenwald is very effective in providing evidence of how Republican ideologues are, in their actions and lives, precisely the opposite of what they say they are. Read Greenwald's book and let us put a stop to the mammoth hypocrisy they have been getting away with for at least the last 28 years. As he puts it on p. 2:

those who playact as powerful Tough Guys and anti-terrorist Warriors and Crusaders for the Values Voters have lives filled with weakness, fear, unbridled hedonism, unearned privilege, sheltered insulation, and none of the "Traditional Masculine Virtues" they endlessly tout.

In his Chapter 1 he shows how that model of Republican Tough and Patriotic American, John Wayne, actually lived his life. In Chapter 2 he describes how the establishment media enables Republican hypocrites to get away with their hypocrisy. Chapter 3 deals with the more general tendency of Republican males to swagger around pretending to be tough guys in their "Tough Guise" while in fact being the opposite. Chapter 4 concerns Republican shamming of being morally superior examples of family values.

Chapter Five examines what has perhaps become the most transparent Republican myth of all: that it is the party of small government, limited federal power, and individual liberty.

In his final chapter Greenwald focuses upon John McCain's hypocrisies. This is an excellent book.