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Memoirs like this one are becoming a new sort of genre affiliated with the Bush administration: the 'I was just an innocent conservative who didn't realize the den of wolves I was walking into' book. Frankly, I find these books nauseating, even though I'm happy to see them if and when they damage the Bush administration politically.
Why do I find them nauseating? Because they are, in effect, a classic form of non-apology apology. They make the claim that it was not possible from the outside to see the administration for the pack of cynical wolves they are, when this is indeed plain as the nose on your face to a person with the leisure to peruse the paper once a day. In effect, I'm supposed to believe that a Christian man with connections climbs up the GOP's stinky political ladder without noting the corruption along the way? And then decide that his climb down is honorable, when it involves so little apparent sense of his own culpability?
It bothers me when people who rallied behind the war in '03 feel no sense of shame in writing critiques of the war today. Frankly, we are owed not confessions and kiss-and-tell memoirs, but public acts of repentance: because I just don't believe that you didn't know; I think you let yourself be seduced by power and money and appearance on TV, and now are choosing to flee a sinking ship.
The Christian thing to do would not to engage in the dog-and-pony show of warning the Christianist right that it is being played by frauds; the Christianist right surely knows that; in effect all this does is offer another fig leaf to hide guilt under as it turns out--low and behold--that politics based on fear, deception, and hate turn out to be dangerous to the nation and its soul. What a surprise!
Repent, rather than write memoirs!
