At least, in the eyes of those who find out that being an apologist and fellow traveler to rapacious capitalism still won’t provide you access to that which is being conserved. Doing ‘the club’s’ dirty work just isn’t the same as being invited to join ‘the club’. Even worse is realizing that you’ve only be invited in to clean it. Wonder how long it took these worshippers of the fat-cat capitalist class to convince themselves that this isn’t utter hypocrisy?:
Five authors have sued the parent company of Regnery Publishing, a Washington imprint of conservative books, charging that the company deprives its writers of royalties by selling their books at a steep discount to book clubs and other organizations owned by the same parent company.
In a suit filed in United States District Court in Washington yesterday, the authors Jerome R. Corsi, Bill Gertz, Lt. Col. Robert (Buzz) Patterson, Joel Mowbray and Richard Miniter state that Eagle Publishing, which owns Regnery, “orchestrates and participates in a fraudulent, deceptively concealed and self-dealing scheme to divert book sales away from retail outlets and to wholly owned subsidiary organizations within the Eagle conglomerate.”
Imagine these conservatives’ horror to find out that a big, profitable business put more energy into deflating their authors’ royalties than into publishing more odes to child labor and deforestation. But, then, these are the deep-thinkers who wrote bestsellers swift-boating Kerry and ‘proving’ that Bush is really winning the war on terror. My, how sudden, how selective, their distaste for fraud, deception and self-dealing. Sorta like the slaves who narc’d on runaways only to find themselves still put to the lash for minor infractions. No honor among thieves, guys. Certainly, there’s no intellectual consistency, not when money’s concerned. Here’s my favorite part:
“It suddenly occurred to us that Regnery is making collectively jillions of dollars off of us and paying us a pittance.” He added: “Why is Regnery acting like a Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company?”
Here’s another question: why do they think Regnery’s (alleged) business practices are Marxist when it is in fact these authors’ critique which is? Where you stand really does seem to depend on where you sit.
