Reviews for Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe (and What You Need to Know to End the Madness)

The average rating for Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe (and What You Need to Know to End the Madness) based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-08-04 00:00:00 William Short 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.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-06-09 00:00:00 Hilario Fareaux I saw Ms. Huffington interviewed on The Colbert Report and she was wearing an evening gown and speaking in a great Greek accent. I decided I need to read her book. Synopsis: For Arianna Huffington, the problem with the Republican Party is not that it is at odds with the views of progressives, but that its lunatic fringe has taken over the party and is at odds with the views of the American people. By significant majorities, Americans believe in the science of evolution, don't want Roe v. Wade overturned, don't want to ignore global warming, want good health care for their kids, and want to bring our troops home from Iraq. And yet, to Huffington, the representatives of the Right seem to be competing over who among them can be the biggest Neanderthal and are having the time of their lives supporting torture, standing by the behavior of the Blackwater thugs, and backing the White House's delusions on everything from war to stem cell research. Flashing back to the Reagan era is one thing, but flashing back to the Dark Ages is quite another. And this is what Right Is Wrong will expose. I am a Liberal. I have Liberal ideas. Very few of my morals, ethics, ideas are conservative. However, I almost want to say that this book is the lunatic Liberal. Some of the arguments were well documented and well put. Others seem to be taunts that you hear on playgrounds and were completely unnecessary. I agree with her about the war, highly unnecessary. She did have a lot of documentation backing up her points on how Bush was planning for a war before he was even President. (The Sources section of the book is massive). For the most part, I disagreed almost entirely with the immigration section and the health section. Yes, we have problems with both, but the Democrat solution isn't the best one either, I don't believe. Politics is a bloody game and this book shows how much of a game it really is. Obama '08!