"Bad apples all around"

Salon gives us this excerpt from what looks like a very interesting book by Thomas Frank called "The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule." A taste:

How are we to dissect a deluge like this one? We might begin by categorizing the earmarks handed out by Congress, sorting the foolish earmarks from the costly earmarks from the earmarks made strictly on a cash basis. We could try a similar approach to government contracting: the no-bid contracts, the no-oversight contracts, the no-experience contracts, the contracts handed out to friends of the vice president. We might consider the shoplifting career of one of the president's former domestic policy advisors or the habitual plagiarism of the president's liaison to the Christian right. And we would certainly have to find some way to parse the extraordinary incompetence of the executive branch, incompetence so fulsome and steady and reliable that at some point Americans stopped being surprised and began simply to count on it, to think of incompetence as the way government works.

But the onrushing flow swamps all taxonomies. Mass firing of federal prosecutors; bribing of newspaper columnists; pallets of shrink-wrapped cash "misplaced" in Iraq; inexperienced kids running the Baghdad stock exchange; the discovery that many of Alaska's leading politicians are apparently on the take -- our heads swim. We climb to the rooftop, but we cannot find the heights of irony from which we might laugh off the blend of thug and Pharisee that was Tom DeLay -- or dispel the nauseating suspicion, quickly becoming a certainty, that the government of our nation deliberately fibbed us into a pointless, catastrophic war.

UPDATE: See also this interview of Thomas Frank by Salon's Rick Perlstein.

Well, conservatives have been screaming for decades about how disrespected and downtrodden they are, and the media has finally learned the lesson. They are terrified of the famous "liberal bias" critique, and the tidal waves of criticism that will crash down on them if they examine conservatism straightforwardly. So they don't.

What they prefer instead is to talk about "both parties," and always to assume that everything in American politics is done simultaneously and in precisely equal measure by both sides. Believing this closes off all kinds of inquiry to you, blinds you to all sorts of not-so-subtle nuances and imbalances in the system.

There's also the problem that the things I focus on -- for example, that conservatism tends to be an organic product of business interests -- are things that disturb them. Journalists might be social liberals, but there are damned few of them who are ready to scrutinize the power of business or the benevolence of markets. Or the motives of entrepreneurs, even when they call themselves "political entrepreneurs."

My own observation, though, is that we have been living through a conservative era, that conservatives regard the state and corruption and political activity in a particular way, and that therefore these things need to be investigated. Yes, I know, the liberal era of 30 years ago had huge flaws, too, and its own pattern of corruption, its own favored groups, all of which are very, very well known. I know those things. Everyone knows them. But they happened a long time ago.

I think we need to talk about the people who are ruling us now -- how they think, what they have done with the state, and why it is that a new scandal seems to erupt every goddamned week.

UPDATE II: Maha weighs in too.