Conservative Morality

Michael Tomasky discusses the oxymoron "conservative morality" and how it is fueling the downfall of the Bush Adminstration (snippet):

....Indeed, liberals have watched this administration in a state of perpetual disbelief about the number of stories that should have blown up into scandals but never did. From Harken Energy to Thomas White and Enron to the Tom Scully-Richard Foster-Medicare story to the more general rancid politicization of every agency of government, the potential scandals have been nonstop. And liberals, who care about public integrity and process, can't comprehend that these things haven't become full-fledged scandals. There are particular reasons they haven't -- no smoking gun was found on Harken, for instance. But the big historical reason they haven't is that we live in an age in which conservative morality is dominant. Public morality and adherence to democratic process just aren't as important. In the 1960s and ’70s, when we lived in an era of liberal morality, those two qualities were more important, and the kinds of scandals we had then? Watergate, most obviously, but smaller-fry dustups like the Bert Lance affair reflected the privileged position of those concerns. Liberals didn't care so much about personal morality, and while they cared about positive results, they were less likely to bend rules to achieve them. (It's worth remembering, too, that as far as public service in this country was concerned, liberals wrote most of the rules.) But beginning in the 1980s, conservatives successfully discredited liberal morality and substituted their own. Now, personal morality was pre-eminent -- Ronald Reagan as the stand-up man's man, contrasted with Bill Clinton, or at least with the image of Clinton that the right successfully peddled, as a licentious and corner-cutting and self-indulgent baby boomer. That Clinton was nearly brought down in the web of a personal-morality scandal was a reflection not only of his own weaknesses of the flesh but also of the fact that this was the sort of thing conservatives cared most about and sought most fiercely to expose. To them, Clinton’s personal failings disqualified him from capable public service, and they got the mainstream media to agree with them (though, fortunately, not the majority of the country). The packaging of George W. Bush in 1999 and 2000 was nothing less than a conservative morality play. He was a "good man"; he'd gotten himself off the sauce and found Jesus; he didn't, as far as anyone knew, play around on his wife. Meanwhile, as governor of Texas, he'd squelched an investigation into a funeral-home chain run by a friend; he'd stacked the board of the University of Texas Investment Management Company, a huge deal that no major national media ever took a close, sustained look at; he kept starting failing businesses, losing money, and somehow getting richer and richer. But none of these issues, all having directly to do with public morality, mattered. He was a good, strong man who "got results" for Texas and would do the same for America....

Be sure to read the entire article - it's one of the best I've seen on the subject.