Free Republic

En route to getting shellacked by historic proportions in the 1964 presidential race, the Republican challenger, Senator Barry Goldwater, suffered through a smear job every bit as oversize and ugly as Lyndon B. Johnson’s gallbladder scar. Not the infamous “daisy ad” circulated by the Johnson campaign, in which a young girl innocently pulled the petals from a flower until a mushroom cloud filled the frame. While setting a new standard for negative campaigning, that TV commercial was at least rooted in Goldwater’s loose talk about using “low yield” atomic bombs in the escalating Vietnam War. The truly low blow came...

Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly In his seventh book, Dean, the former Nixon legal counsel whom the FBI has called the "master manipulator" of the Watergate coverup, weighs in with a rebuke to Christian fundamentalists and other right-wing hard-liners. A self-described Goldwater conservative (indeed, Goldwater had planned to collaborate on this book before his death), he rails against the influence of social conservatives and neoconservatives within his party. Suffused with bitterness stemming from the controversies in which he has been embroiled, Dean's book paints a thin social science veneer over a litany of mostly ad hominem complaints. Purporting to...

The Admirable Openness of the 9/11 Commission: Why Charges It Is Overly Politicized Are In Error By JOHN W. DEAN Friday, May. 07, 2004 A growing chorus of Republicans and members of the conservative media has charged that the 9/11 Commission has improperly politicized its proceedings, and thus failed before even completing its work. From the floors of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, to the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal (which has opposed the Commission's investigation from the outset), there have been calls for resignation of a commissioner, charges of partisanship, and claims of...