Conscience of the conservatives

Don't miss this nifty testimony from the former State Department director of media affairs, the latest truth-teller from inside the Bush administration. "They just wanted us to be Bush automatons," he says; no surprise.

Conservative intellectuals love to debate, to the finest imaginable level of abstraction, what qualities essentially define a "conservative." They proudly trumpet their distance from the pragmatic messiness of politics, announce themselves as the Republican Party's guardians of principle—insisting, rather, that they owe no allegiance to any party at all. Not too long ago I attended one of their marquee conferences on the subject, absorbing endless disquisitions on not merely how many angels it took to dance on this particular pin, but what precisely the pin should be made of, with exact specifications on its size and shape. They love this stuff. It lets them claim that their "movement" is essentially anarchic, an intellectual free-for-all, a debate that never ends. Most especially, one after one, they expressed doubts that the Bush administration was essentially "conservative" at all.

These panels taught me nothing about the essence of conservatism. For that, I had to await the surprise appearance of the guest of honor, presidential councilor Karl Rove, who appeared before us behind closed doors, with city cops posted at the threshold. This is the first time I've publicly told the story. The cowardly conservative truth-tellers running the conference insisted the briefing be "off the record."

Rove told them to shut up about conservative "purity," and said they were going to run the White House any way they please to achieve a permanent Republican majority. He singled out conservative magazines' criticism of the Bush administration's recent steel tariff for special scorn, if I recall.

Came the Q&A, when one after the other, the brave conservative intellectual truth-tellers put on a display of groveling I'd never seen before in a university setting. I'll never forget the truth-teller who apologized for criticizing the steel tariff, before asking how he himself could help Rove's political goals.

Obiescence in the face of strongmen: that is the essence of conservatism.

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