Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us...

Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe | Arianna Huffington | Slapdash diatribe cut and paste job

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Right Is Wrong: Ho...

	Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe Arianna Huffington Knopf, 2008 - 400 pages average customer review:based on 20 reviews view larger image
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With her trademark passion, intelligence, and devastating wit, Huffington Post editor in chief Arianna Huffington tackles the issues that are crucial to this year?s presidential election and, even more so, to the fate of the country.

Huffington makes the case that America has been hijacked from within by a radical element?the ?lunatic fringe? of the Right that has taken over the Republican Party. Despite holding views at odds with the majority of Americans, these zealots have given us an endless war in Iraq, a sputtering economy, a health care system on life support, a war on science and reason, and an immoral embrace of torture.

But they haven?t done it on their own: they have been enabled by a compliant media that act as if there is no such thing as truth and are more interested in cozying up to those in power than in holding them accountable, and by feckless Democrats who have allowed themselves to be intimidated into backing down again and again.

Both a withering indictment and a hopeful call to arms, Right Is Wrong is an explosive, boldly incisive work that will help set the national agenda.

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Read this while considering who to vote for in 2008

Title Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe
Author: Arianna Huffington
Rating ****

Tags politics, current affairs. republican party, george w. bush, john mccain

Huffington is the founder of one of the most widely read political blogs, The Huffington Post. She is a native of Greece, but has been an enthusiastic participant in politics in this country for many years. She started as a Republican, and one of the more interesting parts of Right Is Wrong is her discussion of why she was Republican and what changed her. She was a Republican because she believed in limited government, that private sources were the best remedies for society's ills. She was always concerned with issues of helping the poor, and thought that many Republicans were as well.

She left the Republican party after Newt Gingrich heard her ideas on helping the poor and said that they were the kind of ideas Republicans needed. It wasn't long before she realized that he was not actually interested in helping the poor but in the appearance of doing so. She also "...came to recognize that the task of overcoming poverty is too monumental to be achieved without the raw power of annual appropriations." (p. 9)

Since then, she says that many of her friends who are Republican have become bewildered by the direction of the Party. So the book is about how the fringe elements took over the GOP and hijacked its principles.

After a couple of chapters on the pitiful state of the media now (including an honor roll of the few journalists who were right, and reporting what they knew, in the run-up to the Iraq war (which fits well with the episode of Bill Moyer's Journal called "Buying the War"), Huffington goes into a litany of the insanities of the George W. Bush administration. She covers everything from a bad energy bill to the politicization of science to the Iraq war to the failure in Afghanistan, to torture, to immigration, to the recession, to the state of health care, to the end of the ban on assault weapons. It is sickening, but not all that new. Her main point for repeating all of this is to reinforce it in the public's mind in this crucial election, and to show how electing John McCain would be a continuation of Bush's failed policies. It seems that the policies and behavior of McCain since he decided to run for President this time have been a major disappointment to Huffington. She has known, worked with, and admired John McCain in the past, but lays out how his positions have changed to pander to the people who can make him President. Most tragic of all is his change of position on torture, from saying that one of the things that kept him going during his own torture was knowing that his country would not do anything of the sort, to his recent vote to not extend prohibitions on torture to the CIA.

It is an important book and an important message. Presidents don't always act in office as they promise on the campaign trail. George W. Bush is an example, he ran as a moderate in 2000 and then governed from somewhere right of the Neanderthals. But we can't take a chance on a McCain presidency for so many reasons, starting with the composition of the Supreme Court under a President McCain.

One of the interesting pieces to me in her discussion of the politicization of the Justice Department and the firing of the eight U.S. attorneys. Four of the eight fired were looking into corruption charges against Republicans. This is an interesting bit on Rove's involvement:

"Unraveling the cover-ups revealed that the the evidence trail on the firings went all the way to the White House. In an interview with MCClatchy newspapers, Alan Weh, chairman of the New Mexico Republican party, admitted that, in 2005, he asked a White Hose staffer who worked for Karl Rove for help in getting rid of New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias. Weh, unhappy that Iglesias refused to rush a showy investigation of Democratic officials in time for the 2006 election, followed up directly with Rove in 2006.

According to Weh, his conversation with the Boy Genius went something like this:

Weh: is anything ever going to happen to that guy [Iglesias]?

Rove: He's gone." (p. 300)

The 2008 Presidential election is the most important in a generation. Arianna Huffington is doing what she can to see that citizens go into the voting booth knowing the stakes involved.

Publication Knopf (2008), Edition: 1, Hardcover, 400 pages
Publication date 2008
ISBN 0307269663 / 9780307269669

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Slapdash diatribe cut and paste job

In 1994, I became Reuters Chief Political Correspondent and immediately plunged into covering the upcoming congressional elections which produced a Republican sweep. I well remember covering a speech by Newt Gingrich that summer at the Heritage Foundation which was preceded by an impassioned right-wing rant by none other than Arianna Huffington.
Huffington's husband at the time, Michael, heir to a Texas oil fortune, was running for the U.S. Senate in California that year spending millions from his vast personal fortune. He came within a whisker of beating Diane Feinstein. He ran largely on the familiar "family values" platform so beloved of Republicans. Even at the time, Michael was seen as little more than a mouthpiece for his ambitious wife. Later that summer, I was granted a rare interview with Michael (his wife mostly kept him away from reporters) and it was quite evident who supplied the brains and thrusting ambition in that marriage.
Had he won, there's little doubt in my mind his wife would have pushed him to run for president a few years later.
In 1998, now dumped by his wife, Mr. Huffington revealed he was bi-sexual and later co-chaired the "Log Cabin Republicans" -- a group of gay Republicans.
Arianna, her hopes of become a power behind the Republican throne thwarted, meanwhile had a dramatic change of heart and reinvented herself as a rabid liberal and editor of the popular liberal blog, the Huffington Report.
In this book, she gives a brief and inadequate explanation of what prompted this change of heart. She says she was "seduced, fooled, blinded, bamboozled" by Newt Gingrich. She was always a "social liberal," she says, but has since realized the government needs to be involved to fight poverty. At the same time, she argues, the Republican Party has itself moved to the right.
As an explanation, this falls short. It was abundantly clear in 1994 where the Republicans stood on social issues. If anything, the party has become more tolerant of government activity now than it was in those days when it campaigned on a platform of closing down the federal departments of Energy and Education.
Now to the meat of this book. I have no argument with most of its content but there's nothing new here that the attentive reader of any decent daily newspaper would not already know. It starts with a violent rant against the New York Times, Washington Post and other traditional media for failing to do their jobs. There are amusing personal attacks on several prominent reporters -- Bob Woodward, Judith Miller and the posthumously beatified Tim Russert.
Other chapters deal with fiscal policy, energy, Iraq, Afghanistan, science, the environment etc etc. It ends with an assault on John McCain. Most of this stuff could be lifted verbatim from Barack Obama's website.
I don't object to any of this but it's pretty standard stuff and rather tedious. There's no original research or original arguments. It's pretty much a cut and paste job, written in haste and published to take advantage of the current political season. Liberals may buy it. I doubt anyone else will.
Huffington is a talented individual but her main talent seems to be that of constantly reinventing and promoting herself. She is the political chameleon par excellence. Just as she did in 1994, she knows which way the political winds are blowing.

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