Salesmanship

Here's what I think: As soon as you become one of the top donors to the Bush/Cheney machine, or get a presidential appointment, they take you to Nevada and photograph you in bed with a dead hooker. Then you get dropped off at home and get to return to your regular duties, knowing they've always got the pictures.

• If you're the incoming chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and you say that the country is mostly pro-choice so anti-choice Supreme Court nominees would be inappropriate, they'll get you to publicly publicly abase yourself and agree to consider anti-abortion nominees within two weeks.


• If you're an ex-cabinet official who says the Bush administration was looking for a way to gin up a war with Iraq from the first days of the presidency and you figure they can't get you because you're rich and retired, they'll still get you to recant your story within about a week.


• If you're their Director of the Office of Faith Based Initiatives, and you point out that the White House cares nothing for policy, only politics and the accumulation of power, they'll get you to apologize and express remorse within 24 hours.


• And even if you're a Bush Pioneer and a member of the Texas political royalty, and the Vice President has a beer or two with lunch and then shoots you in the face when you're quail hunting a little while later, they'll get you to apologize to the guy who shot you--and his family--within hours of leaving the hospital where you spent almost a week in intensive care.

That, to me, is the astonishing part: They don't just silence their former allies when they go public with damaging information, they force them through the humiliation of publicly recanting and expressing contrition.

Jonathan Chait offered more examples of the pattern a couple of years ago.