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Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe By Arianna Huffington ( Knopf )
Release Date: 2008-04-29
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Product Description
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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 She is accurate, but she still is only interested in her big ego and her business, than for real change ( drey1964 )
Always had a lot of respect for Arianna and I am a total Democrat. I used to read her online news mag every day. At the point where she went after John Edward for having an affair, like she is the editor in choef of the Enquirer, I had enough of her infotainment. There are so many more hypocritical sex scandals on GOP side, and huge issues about rigging elections and profiteering of the war, that everything she writes about now is inevitably seen as a way to cash in and not follow her principles.
I am over her now. Her journalism is infotainment and has little integrity, no matter how Democratic she appears to be.
So what is her efforts in exposing the GOP lunatic fringe all about when she can't help her big ego from getting some phony journalistic validation for John Edwards, who is young attractive man and has a wife who unfortunately has health issues and probably has no sex drive? Arianna, How about the Media gave you equal attention when it turned out that she was married to a gay guy? Hypocrisy is trendy on both side of the aisle.
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 Slapdash diatribe cut and paste job ( elsnera3 )
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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True, but boring
I agree with Huffington in her thesis that the right has hijacked U.S. political life, and that Reagan's right has been taken over by extreme fundamentalists. I also happen to think that the Bush presidency has been the worst ever for the U.S. ---and for those of us watching with incredulity from other countries. Never before have we seen the U.S. turn its back on its ideals without even blushing. However, I expected a less emotional, more documented book. If you are looking for the equivalent of a shouting match in a book, this is it; if you appreciate deep thought and analyses, you may be disappointed.
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 Right Is Wrong......
I have not even received this order yet! It is way overdue. I have responded to Amazon and the seller directly. I'm pissed. Someone please help. Thank you!
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Unartful Propaganda ( mpeters53 )
Ms. Huffington offers a less than artful propaganda rant. Ms. Huffington's methods are thus: stack the deck and only enunciate facts that support her preconceived position, ignore the evidence if it disagrees with her position, ignore the question by attacking her opponent's credibility on something that is totally unrelated to the issue at hand, and if he is unable to come up with anything embarrassing to her opponent just ignorantly name call.
Ms. Huffington uses her blunt techniques in her discussion of global warming. She most of time attacks Congressional foes of the global warming hoax by spotlighting some perceived blemish to their records that is completely irrelevant. In other cases she can only shriek that certain Senators with one hundred times her intelligence and knowledge are 'dumb' or the 'dumbest Senator'. Oh puhlease.
Then there is Ms. Huffington on the issue at hand. She mentions that an island in the South Pacific is sinking. She does not mention that sea levels have not been rising much lately. In Stockholm Sweden records of sea levels go back to 800 AD. Researcher M. Ekman demonstrates the sea level change mostly ranges from -1.5 to 1.5 millimeters per year. Little has changed over the ages. And this interval includes the Medieval Warm Period when temperatures were several degrees above those now.
Ms. Huffington mentions melting glaciers in Alaska. But some recent glaciers are expanding instead of melting. And the melting of glaciers is caused by changing cloud cover, precipitation and ocean currents as much as temperature.
Ms. Huffington also suggests most scientists support the global warming hypothesis. She loudly enunciates the science is solved. She mentions three hundred presumed scientists presenting a report on the melting in Alaska. However she neglects the 31,000 scientists who signed a recent petition from the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine disputing the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis. She also neglects the famous scientists featured in the Lawrence Solomon's book The Deniers: The World Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud**And those who are too fearful to do so who have refuted at least parts of the global warming hypothesis.
Neglected is that carbon dioxide exists in the atmosphere in only a tenth of the proportion of the other socalled greenhouse gas, water vapor. Note that the effect of carbon dioxide on the reflection of infrared radiation back to earth follows the filter effect. What this filter effect means that an additional unit of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will reflect significantly fewer infrared rays than the same unit quantity of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere. This effect can be demonstrated by windows filtering light. If the first window filters 33% of the original light, the second window will only filter 22.2% of the original light. Moreover carbon dioxide only reflects infrared rays in certain frequencies, most of which frequencies are already reflected back to earth by the more prominent water vapor in the atmosphere.
In sum this book is not worth bothering with.
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