Watch What You Read . . .

Archconservatives had their day with books lambasting Bill Clinton for high crimes and misdemeanors so nutty that, had it been the Sixties I'd have attributed those rants to a bad tab of LSD. Now comes a slew of tomes taking it to Georgedick Bushcheney. But as fun as it may be to read that the anointed president is sharing a conspiracy with Saudi oil sheikhs to get elected this November, it may not be true.

Lefties can write bad books, too.

So whom should you believe?

For starters, place more trust in volumes written by people who have some knowledge about what they're writing about. That would include former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill (“The Price of Loyalty,” with Ron Suskind) and former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke (“Against All Enemies”), who wrote about how the Bushcheney administration conducts business. When you're writing about life on the inside, it helps to have actually been on the inside.

Then, there are those who may not have been on the inside at the same time and place, but whose own experiences give them the credibility to write about closely related topics. John W. Dean (no relation to Howard) is such an individual. As a former legal counsel to President Richard Nixon, Dean was aware of how the Watergate scandal and White House secrecy were impairing democracy. So when he recognized the same thing occurring 30 years after his former boss was compelled to resign in disgrace, he hit the keyboard (“Worse Than Watergate”).

Finally, there are the journalists. The real journalists, those who have worked for mainstream media with strong credentials. Bob Woodward of the Washington Post comes to mind (“Plan of Attack”). Unless Woodward has totally sold out, he should retain at least some of the journalistic lessons he and colleague Carl Bernstein learned when they broke Watergate. The Post didn't print a word of what Woodward and Bernstein wrote unless it was corroborated by at least two sources and all evidence was thoroughly checked and accounted for. Woodward later became a Post editor where, it must be assumed, he insisted on the same standards from his reporters.

What about best sellers such as Al Franken's “Lies (and the Lying Liars who Tell Them” and Craig Unger's “House of Bush, House of Saud”? Well, I've read the former, and it's entertaining (more entertaining than Franken is on his Air America Radio show), but nothing I would want to base a scholarly work on. I haven't read Unger's book because I've been let down in the past by too many “investigative journalists” who purport to uncover the secrets of whatever, only to fall utterly flat, as the New York Times reported in its review. Those kind of books leave me feeling the way I do after eating a bag of potato chips: full, urpy and unsatisfied.

Contact Ira Lacher here.