NewsMax is a conservative  magazine that is really as doctrinaire and ideological as critics accuse Fox News of being. (Compared to NewsMax, Fox is the Daily Kos.) It also has strange ideas about whom we should admire. I just heard a radio ad for NewsMax that trumpeted, “Dick Morris says it’s his favorite magazine!”

This endorsement is supposed to make me, or anyone who values basic ethical values (including, presumably, many of those core conservative values NewsMax is always invoking), run out and subscribe?  Knowing what I know about Dick Morris, I would have sworn his favorite magazine would be “Con Man Today,”  “Back-stabber’s Weekly,” or ” Hustler.”

Dick Morris, you may recall, was a top an adviser to the Bill Clinton after he was elected president in 1992. Morris, to whom integrity appears to be an alien concept, crafted  Clinton’s cynical “triangulation” approach that abandoned principle and conviction for good poll numbers.  He had been a Republican strategist before helping Clinton outmaneuver  the GOP at every turn; to Morris, whoever pays his salary has the right ideas for America.

Clinton, meanwhile, had made Morris powerful and successful, so Morris showed his gratitude (and level of maturity, responsibility, and trustworthiness) , by allowing a prostitute he was paying and enjoying to listen in on his private phone conversations with the President. For this he had to resign, of course. This sordid incident was also what made Morris, for the first time, known to the general public; in this his subsequent celebrity mirrors that of Paris Hilton, Larry Craig, and Jessica Hahn). Even after this, Clinton continued to use Morris as an advisor (we will not discuss what this says about Bill’s values and judgment), and infamously requested his counsel during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Morris took a poll for Clinton to determine whether Clinton should tell the truth about the affair.This accurately reflects Morris’s views on honesty: if it works, it’s a good thing. (Clinton’s too, unfortunately.)

One would think that President Clinton had earned some continuing loyalty from Morris, but not in Morris’s calculations. Given a chance to write a tell-all book in which he could reveal embarrassing private encounters with the Clintons in exchange for a lucrative contract and speaking engagements in front of Clinton-hating conservative groups, Dick went for the bucks. He re-invented himself as a virulent Clinton and wrote book after book condemning Bill and especially Hillary, even though nobody would know who he was if it were not for their patronage.

What a guy!

Usually companies that are promoting a product seek the endorsements of prominent individuals who have consistently shown themselves to be smart, courageous, trustworthy, and ethical. If the publishers of NewsMax think that the career of Dick Morris has thus far demonstrated any of those things, I’d like to know what dictionary they are using. Morris is in the shady pantheon of ethically-challenged conservatives like Oliver North, Tom DeLay and G. Gordon Liddy that should give anyone second, third and fourth thoughts before joining a group, or subscribing to a magazine, that has such wretched taste in heroes.