Mr. Jeff Baker, the book editor for the Oregonian newspaper in Portland, Oregon, reviewed YOU DON'T KNOW ME on August 22. His review is an interesting document in this ongoing story of the unraveling of Republican moral pretensions and bears examination. Let's first take a look at how he presents the material that is in our book--and then explore a little the question of why he presents it the way he does.
"Win McCormack was talking about Republican sex scandals," he begins, referring to an interview he did with me over the phone, " a subject he examines in his new book You Don't Know Me: A Citizen's Guide to Republican Family Values. "
"Republicans are hypocritical, McCormack said, lecturing the public on morals while cheating on their spouses, soliciting prostitutes, and worse. The examples are endless: Newt Gingrich, David Vitter, Larry Craig, Bob Barr, Arnold Schwarzenegger..."
"Uh, what about John Edwards? "
" 'I was waiting for that,' McCormack said. 'I thought that might be the first question.'"
"It turns out Republicans don't have an exclusive on sexual hypocrisy. Bill Clinton is a Democrat, and so is Edwards, the former presidential candidate who recently admitted to an affair with a woman who produced campaign videos for him."
Hold on a minute. Was Bill Clinton ever found "lecturing the public on morals"? I don't think so. Never in his life did Bill Clinton lecture the public on sexual morals or, as far as I know, any category of morals. Ditto Edwards, I think, unless you take his withering critique of the extremes of economic inequality in America to be such. Mr. Baker's review begins by casually slipping in a false premise, in a transparent effort to equate the behavior of Edwards and Clinton with that of the many dastardly personages in my book.
Not that Edwards' shameful behavior doesn't cry out to be addressed. But let's look at how Alison Hallett handled the matter in her review of YOU DON'T KNOW ME in the Portland newsweekly the Portland Mercury.
"The publication of Win McCormack's You Don't Know Me: A Citizen's Guide to Republican Family Values," she writes, "coincided neatly with revelations about John Edwards' affair, and at first glance would seem to rattle the book's proud stance against 'Republican hypocrisy.' But McCormack is quick to concede that 'sexual sinning is obviously not confined to any particular group of people; on the contrary it seems clearly endemic in human nature.'"
"He goes on to assert that the degree of sexual misconduct found in this survey of Republican sex scandals far surpasses mere infidelity, and has broader implications. 'While you would probably find a fair amount of philandering among the population of liberal progressives, including no doubt transactions with prostitutes, I don't believe you could possibly find anything approaching the same level of deviance...that we have unearthed in our research, because there is not the same configuration of psychological and philosophical underpinnings for it that we have identified (in conservatives).'"
In others words, folks, in the introduction to the book I fully address the incidence of adulterous behavior among Democratic political leaders, well in advance of the Edwards example (the introduction was written last spring), and provided an explanation for why I don't think it is especially relevant to the book's substance. Why didn't Mr. Baker, if he was going to bring up the Edwards case as his opening gambit, mention this? (His omission goes beyond that. You wouldn't know from anything in his review that there is an interpretive introduction to the book, which Whitney Hawke, who reviewed the book for the Willamette Week, another alternative Portland weekly, said "provides valuable context").
Two explanations come to mind. The first is that Mr. Baker, unlike Hallett and Hawke, didn't actually read YOU DON'T KNOW ME before reviewing it, or didn't read it very carefully. I am going to pay Mr. Baker the professional courtesy of rejecting that explanation out of hand. I am sure that he perused with great care the sole book he was going to review in the Oregonian's weekly arts and entertainment section. So that leaves the only other explanation that I can think of at the moment: Mr. Baker sincerely believes that the adulterous behavior of John Edwards and Bill Clinton is on par with the misbehavior of the family values Republican political leaders that I describe in the book.
Let me reprise the statistics presented at the beginning of the introduction, which Mr. Baker surely must have considered before commenting on the book. The book includes 110 instances of sexual misconduct, and 22 of those 110 involve adultery. The others include the following: 10 transactions with prostitutes; 3 occurrences of incest; 6 reports of sexual assault and 4 of sexual battery; 15 cases of child molestation; 13 of involvement with child pornography; 7 of soliciting sex with minors; 3 concerning children 5 years old; and one concerning a 3-year-old. Additional examples include sexual harassment, gangbanging, autoerotic asphyxiation, and bestiality.
Of the 110 cases in the book, 46 involve pedophilia. That's 42-43 percent of the total. When you add to that number the instances of other crimes, it comes out that well over half of the cases in the book involve actual criminal conduct. Adultery of course is not in the criminal code, so the 22 cases of that are not counted there.
Mr. Baker writes, "The entry on Gingrich is the longest, and McCormack points out that the former House speaker 'outlived the scandals' and 'soldiered on.' In that way, he is similar to Clinton, whom McCormack thinks 'survived the Monica Lewinsky scandal quite well. '" This equation of New Gingrich and Bill Clinton again serves, intentionally or not, to obscure the main point of the book. The reason that Newt has the longest entry, besides the fact that his list of infractions is so voluminous, is that in the secular (as opposed to the evangelical) realm he has been at once the most aggressive proponent of family values and critic of supposed liberal hedonism and the most frequent and blatant violator of those values. He carried on almost nonstop affairs during his marriages and was having one with a young staff member not much older than Monica during his campaign to impeach Bill Clinton. His church once had to take up a collection to support his wife and children because he was refusing to do so himself.
Mr. Baker has the following paragraph toward the end of his article: "McCormack is a big donor to Democratic candidates and causes, including at least $250,000 within Oregon in 2006. He's an alternate delegate to the Democratic Convention next week and says he supports 'all the Democrats who are running.'"
No, reader, you haven't lost track of things here or slipped into an alternate reality--Mr. Baker's piece is supposed to be a book review. So what is this paragraph doing in a book review? Mr. Jeff Baker must think (or hope) that highlighting my involvement in partisan politics will raise suspicions about the book's objectivity.
Unfortunately for Mr. Baker--as well as postmodernists of both the Right and the Left--there is such a thing as objective reality and neutral facts that are not in fact partisan. Every important statement in YOU DON'T KNOW ME is referenced to a source--there are 473 footnotes in the book--and backed up in almost all cases of criminality (which, I reiterate, are a majority) by court records (many of which you can find on this website). The facts in the book are irrefutable. Mr. Baker almost certainly knows at least this, and that is why he did not even attempt to grapple with them.
Let me give just one example from the book of the kind of behavior that Mr. Jeff Baker apparently thinks can and should be equated with adultery. In September 2007, assistant federal prosecutor in northern Florida John David "Roy" Atchison flew all the way from Florida to Detroit for what he thought was going to be an assignation with a five-year-old girl. He arranged this encounter over the Internet with someone he thought was her mother, and assured the pretend mother about how tenderly he treated children of that age: "I'm always gentle and loving; not to worry; no damage ever; no rough stuff ever...I've done it plenty." He was arrested at the airport by the Detroit police, who had organized the sting. He was carrying with him a Dora the Explorer doll, hoop earrings, and a jar of petroleum jelly. He later killed himself in jail.
Whitney Hawke in the Willamette Week called YOU DON'T KNOW ME a "Muhammad Ali-like jab square to the Republican groin." At the end of her article about the book Alison Hallett wrote of "the exhaustion of outrage that results after so many sordid pages of beastly behavior toward other human beings (and accompanying descriptions of the perpetrators: Spearheaded Clinton impeachment. Anti-gay crusader. Anti-abortion activist. And on and on)." Clearly both writers were strongly affected by the book. Not so, it would seem, Mr. Jeff Baker, to whom Roy Atchison's foray to Detroit for sex with a five-year-old is no worse than John Edwards sneaking into the Beverly Hilton for a tryst with his mistress or Bill Clinton toying with an intern in the hallways of the White House.
Okay, okay, Reader, I can hear you complaining: All your previous blogs have had an overlay of humor to them, this one is so deadly serious in tone. Okay! I will attempt to inject a note of levity into the proceedings, as difficult as that may be when talking about someone trying to put the moral lapse of cheating on your wife on the same plane as child molestation, rape, incest, child pornography, battery, and satanic ritual abuse. But I will try.
Did you hear the one about Moses and the Ten Commandments? When Moses came down from the mountain and addressed the assembled throng, he said to them, "Well, I've got good news and bad news for you. The good news is: I got him to reduce the number down to ten. The bad news: Adultery is still on the list."