RIGHT IS WRONG
By Arianna Huffington
Alfred A. Knopf, 388 pages, $24.95

Full disclosure: Arianna Huffington and I once had a somewhat half-hearted discussion about my possibly contributing to her eponymous über-blog, The Huffington Post. Nothing ever came of it, but in my time in Washington—even though Arianna lives mostly in L.A.—she’s been a regular guest at the same parties and meetings and panels as I have. She’s even invited me to some.

She’s a unique presence in D.C.: exuberant, friendly, eager to help people network among her vast collection of acquaintances, and, perhaps most unusually for around here, always beautifully dressed. Whenever I see her, it’s our custom to compare shoes. Hers are invariably better.

When I told my husband that I would be reviewing her new book, he asked if I thought that might have an impact on our friendship. I was mildly surprised: “Friends? We’re not not friends. We’re ‘Washington friends.’” Our relationship is based largely on proximity.

Now that Arianna has written Right Is Wrong, I think this former wife of a California Republican Senate candidate, confidante of Newt Gingrich, and onetime “conservative pundit,” might also confess that her relationship to conservatism was equally convenient. It was certainly transitory. If only all “Washington conservatives” were the same way.

She has now embraced the causes of modern progressive liberalism with the fervor of a convert. She suggests that when George W. Bush landed on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln to give his “Mission Accomplished” speech, he should have been “immediately clapped in irons, thrown in the brig, and charged with gross dereliction of duty.” Instead, she sniffs, he “strutted around” in a “crotch-hugging flight suit.” She quite literally accuses the Republican party of messing with people’s minds. (Specifically, she says they overstimulate the amygdala, which sounds like it might have something to do with W’s flight suit but is really the region of the brain that “generates fear.”) Her apologia for once having owned an SUV is fully half as long as her explanation for having been a Republican.

She sneers a bit when she catches author Michael Crichton using a revelation about his past errors to underscore the sincerity of his current beliefs—in his case, a newfound skepticism about global warming: “He makes a good salesman for this anti-intellectual nonsense,” she writes, “because he attacks global warming from the persuasive position of the proselyte.” Of course, she continues, “there is … nothing wrong with changing your mind. God knows I did.” The difference between her intellectual journey and his? Arianna arrived in Damascus; Mr. Crichton in Perdition.

Ms. Huffington has come to believe that the political world is made up of right opinions and wrong ones. As she puts it: “There are … issues that quite simply do not have two sides.” Such certainty means that no matter how engagingly she has put forth her compendium of conservative policy errors—and she does write engagingly—it’s still a songbook for the liberal choir.

Washington observers of a progressive bent will find much to smirk over, such as the entertaining denunciation of Bob Woodward’s latest Bush tome, the one that finally suggests the fundamental corruption of the argument for war: “Welcome to 2002, Bob.”

But in dismissing conservative policy as “wrong,” Ms. Huffington is making a category error that actually disguises a much more serious problem. In the case of policy areas like global warming, abstinence education, torture, wiretapping and, basically, our entire foreign policy, the Bush administration has not just presented ideas that are somehow incorrect; they have factually misrepresented the situation that the policy is supposed to address. Put it even more simply: The problem with the Bush administration isn’t that they’re “wrong”—it’s that they’re lying.

There are, for instance, conservative, market-based proposals to address global warming. There are Republican principles that would lead to the outlawing of torture. There are—I know I’m going to get mail for this—legitimate reasons to remain in Iraq. (It’s harder to make the argument that there were legitimate reasons for going in.) But these are not the arguments that the Bush administration has made. Instead, they’ve denied the existence of the problem in two cases and wildly exaggerated it in the third.

Maybe Ms. Huffington is on to something after all. When they give equal weight to opinions spouted on the left and the right, the media give opinions the appearance of facts and thus allow for the kind of wholesale mendacity that’s characterized the Bush years. I tend to think this is not a political calculation, but a practical one: The media is so paralyzed with fear of “bias” that they refuse to make a distinction between fact and opinion. That would, after all, require reporting, which is expensive—and, I might add, hard. And to weigh the benefits and costs of a conservative policy versus a liberal policy? That is expensive, difficult and, worst of all, boring.

It’s easier for a reporter to dial an expert, insert line A into stance R (or D), and leave it at that. Again, this is less about ignoring or downplaying the superiority of liberal policies than it is about ignoring or downplaying policies, period.

Ms. Huffington neatly illustrates the dangers of this cheap and easy opinion-versus-opinion schema by replaying a CNN segment in which Michael Ware faced off with retired Gen. David Grange about a National Intelligence Estimate on the threat of terrorist violence. Mr. Ware and terrorism analyst Peter Bergen base their analysis on something resembling a fact: Al Qaeda does not have a terribly large presence in Iraq, they both say, and the American government is misleading when they say that the war in Iraq is against Al Qaeda. Mr. Grange, on the other hand, sounds more like a movie producer discussing the plot of an action thriller than a military expert discussing policy: “I like the idea of [terrorists] assembl[ing] in Iraq, because there’s more of them there to take down, instead of hunting them around the world of global operations.” That way we can film the whole thing in Vancouver; what do you say to Costner for Petraeus?

Ms. Huffington was probably being snarky when she described Mr. Grange’s appearance as “reporting for duty as administration apologist.” But it’s funny—or, really, not funny—because, as The New York Times recently revealed, it’s true.

Ana Marie Cox blogs at time.com/swampland. She can be reached at books@observer.com.