cafferty - it's getting ugly out there; the frauds, bunglers, liars, and losers who are hurting america (2007)

It’s Getting Ugly Out There The Frauds, Bunglers, Liars, and Losers Who Are Hurting America JACK CAFFERTY John Wiley & Sons, Inc. It’s Getting Ugly Out There It’s Getting Ugly Out There The Frauds, Bunglers, Liars, and Losers Who Are Hurting America JACK CAFFERTY John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Copyright © 2007 by Jack Cafferty. All rights reserved Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey Published simultaneously in Canada Design and composition by Navta Associates, Inc. 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Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. For more information about Wiley products, visit our web site at www.wiley.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Cafferty, Jack. It’s getting ugly out there : the frauds, bunglers, liars, and losers who are hurting Amer- ica / Jack Cafferty. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-470-14479-4 (cloth) 1. United States—Politics and government—2001– 2. Bush, George W. (George Walker), 1946– I. Title. JK275.C34 2007 973.931—dc22 2007029083 Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Carol, my wife, my life Preface / ix Prologue: This Isn’t the America I Know / 1 1 The Boy in the Bubble / 13 2 Resisting Authority / 27 3 Shame and Shamelessness in New Orleans: Bush’s Category 5 Tipping Point / 33 4 Bordering on Insanity: Illegal Immigration / 54 5 The Straw That Broke the Camel’s Back: What Port Security? / 78 6 Plan B: Stick to Broadcasting / 93 7 Till Debt Do Us Part: How Bush Is Eviscerating Our Middle Class / 103 8 You Need a Very Strong Constitution to Deal with These Guys: The Patriot Act and Other Disasters / 119 9 Culture Shock / 144 10 Dumbing Us Down and Numbing Us Down: This Administration Doesn’t Want Us to Get the Picture / 151 Contents vii 11 Getting Sober / 177 12 Is This Really World War III? Then Let’s Start Fighting It Like It Is / 185 13 The Damage Done: Frauds and Disasters on Capitol Hill / 213 Epilogue: It’s Going to Get Even Uglier Out There in 2008 / 232 Acknowledgments / 256 Index / 257 viii CONTENTS Looking back, I wish my parents, Tom and Jean Cafferty, had been emotionally equipped to do a better job of looking out for my younger brother, Terry, and me. It’s bad enough when the rich, powerful, and arrogant people we put in office tilt the playing field against citizens who are striving to make an honest go of it. This makes me want to scream—or at least rant for a few minutes a day on CNN. Sadly, the demons my parents had to fight when I was growing up weren’t the kind you get to vote out of office every couple of years. They were there with us at home. My folks were both alcoholics who, between them, were married eleven times. It would have been an even dozen, but my dad acciden- tally killed one of his fiancées. My dad had gotten a medical dis- charge from the army for a bleeding ulcer; a half-century later, he died from bone cancer, broke and alone in a V.A. hospital. My mom was so incapacitated by addictions after their divorce that she was eventually unable to hold down a job. I’m the product of a very dysfunctional, sometimes violent, Irish background. Indeed, very little of my backstory qualifies as Hallmark Card material, but it may help you to make sense of the way I see and interpret what’s going on around me. People don’t wind up with this kind of jaundiced, offbeat take on things without going through some interesting stuff. I grew up with no money and dealt with some demons of my own. I was never on a fast track from Andover to Harvard to Preface ix [...]... sleeve My parents had married in Salt Lake and spent their honeymoon in Reno and in Lake Tahoe and never got over it They loved the area so much, they vowed to return there to live They got the chance when I was in second or third grade and my father landed his own four-hour, personality-driven morning radio show on Reno’s KOH, a station that reached throughout northwestern Nevada Pretty soon, my father... where the head used to be and held up the tail end while this thing kept writhing He cut the rattles off and handed them to me I kept them for years and years Once in a while I took them out and shook them around my mother just to get her attention On other hunting trips it was cold and miserable at predawn as we set out duck decoys Once, while we waited in silence in a duck blind, my dad pulled out. .. night my brother and I were asleep when the argument started The screaming through the kitchen wall awakened me, then I heard the sound of my dad smacking my mother That was the first time the awareness came roaring into my mind that this was not paradise My dad moved out and my parents got divorced within a year My brother, my mother, and I moved around a lot, from one modest apartment to the next My... Street, the minimum wage, our maximum debt, Enron, Exxon, health care, underage pages, tax cuts for the rich, and bupkis for Charlie Taxpayer That’s a lot of bothering It’s Getting Ugly Out There examines these and other crises, scandals, and infuriating facts of political life that have been and will be driving the public debate as we head toward the 2008 campaign season It’s been a target-rich seven... “no-brainer for me.” “This is about the war on terror and we are protecting America, ” the president says ad nauseam You want to protect America? Join the United States Army and go shoot yourself some insurgents Protecting America? No, Bush & Co are harming America When I did a piece about the secret travelers’ database—those files will be stored for forty years, and neither you nor I can ever see them... “for the vice president to wander over there to the F-word network for a sit-down with Brit Hume That’s a little like Bon- PROLOGUE 9 nie interviewing Clyde, ain’t it? He’s not going to get any high hard ones there.” The bulk of e-mailers who are critical of me call me a liberal because I attack the status quo No, I attack the status quo because it’s flawed and dangerous The president violated the Constitution... and balanced.” But then neither is the F-word network when you think about it, are they? God, they hate when I call them that! I couldn’t care less about political spin My guidance comes from my own BS detector, and my Situation Room setups aren’t ripped from some partisan list of daily e-mailed talking points Sure, I piss some people off You can’t reach millions of viewers every day the way I do and. .. can lead to apathy and to allowing ourselves to be pushed around But the stakes are now higher than ever, and the people who have been doing the pushing are deadly serious about getting their way Maybe it’s because I’m older or wiser, but I sense a much more dire threat in the air now than there ever was during Vietnam Why aren’t people camping out at or marching on the White House by the millions? We’ve... both of her wrists in the bathroom in a suicide attempt My brother and I had gone to bed and were asleep I was awakened in the dark by her hollering and crying When I walked into the bathroom I found her there, with blood coming out of both wrists I freaked out and yelled for my brother to get up and call the police It was awfully tough An ambulance arrived and got my mom to the hospital Had she not... our American Graffiti nights of cruising PREFACE xvii Virginia Street I had saved up for my ’58 Chevy, one of the cooler, faster cars in town, with my 22-caliber pistol always stashed in the glove compartment, and we passed the time by buying booze under age, hanging out at the carhops and the drive-ins, and getting away with occasional acts of mischief and vandalism As my mom drifted into never-never . Getting Ugly Out There The Frauds, Bunglers, Liars, and Losers Who Are Hurting America JACK CAFFERTY John Wiley & Sons, Inc. It’s Getting Ugly Out There It’s Getting Ugly Out There The. about Wiley products, visit our web site at www.wiley.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Cafferty, Jack. It’s getting ugly out there : the frauds, bunglers, liars, and losers. the head used to be and held up the tail end while this thing kept writhing. He cut the rat- tles off and handed them to me. I kept them for years and years. Once in a while I took them out and