Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics
Author: Glenn Greenwald
SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING:
Falling for the Marlboro Man marketing and sleazy takedown tactics of the Republican Party can be hazardous to the health of this nation!
Ever since the cowboy image of Ronald Reagan was sold to Americans, the Republican Party has used the same John Wayne imagery to support its candidates and take elections. We all know how they govern, but the right-wing propaganda machine is very adept at hijacking debate and marketing their candidates as effectively as the Marlboro Man.
For example:
Myth: The Republican nominee is an upstanding, regular guy who shares the values of the common man.
Reality: He divorced his first wife in order to marry a young multimillionaire heiress whose family then funded his political career.
Myth: Republicans are strong on defense and will keep us safe.
Reality: They prey on fears, and their endless wars make America far less secure.
Myth: Republicans are the party of fiscal restraint and small, limited government.
Reality: Soaring deficits, unchecked presidential power, and an increasingly invasive surveillance state are par for their course.
“Intelligent, insightful.” —Daily Kos
“Glenn Greenwald has done it again.” —Alan Colmes
“Glenn Greenwald is a treasure.” —BuzzFlash
Publishers Weekly
With this provocative book, Greenwald, a former constitutional lawyer and author of A Tragic Legacyand How Would a Patriot Act, purports to expose the "rank myth-making and exploitation of cultural, gender and psychological themes" by the Republican Party. The author begins his attack by targeting John Wayne, whom he sees as a template for right-wing notions of "American courage and conservative manliness." Wayne's avoidance of military service and his string of divorces, both at odds with his public image, are emblematic in this account of a fundamental hypocrisy implicit in conservative mythologies. Greenwald goes on to argue that prominent Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Mitt Romney display the same hypocrisy in their public ideologies and personal lives. Shouldering much of the blame are the press and the media, including Matt Drudge, Ann Coulter, Chris Matthews and even Maureen Dowd, all of whom propagate popular attitudes about virile Republicans and effeminate Democrats. Despite the antipathy the author feels for Coulter, his writing is much like hers. More a partisan screed than a reasoned argument meant to persuade undecided readers, this repetitive text frequently devolves into personal attacks and vast generalizations. (Apr.)
Copyright 2007Reed Business InformationDonna L. Davey, Margaret Heilbrun - Library Journal
Attorney-turned-blogger Greenwald's hypocrites-e.g., John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, Rush Limbaugh, and the Bush administration-have been thus labeled before. Greenwald's examination of them as marketers who successfully created images of themselves and their causes through use of favorite American themes (e.g., the rugged cowboy, the thirst for freedom) isn't all that new either. He's caustic but supports his points with sound research. The results may well have appeal in public libraries.
Table of Contents:
Preface 1
The John Wayne Syndrome 13
How Great American Hypocrites Feed Off One Another 36
Tough Guise 96
Wholesome Family Men 172
Small-Government Tyrants 206
John McCain 247
Acknowledgments 277
Index 279
Go to: Relief Is in the Stretch or Celtic Tattoos
Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World
Author: Margaret MacMillan
National Bestseller
New York Times Editors’ Choice
Winner of the PEN Hessell Tiltman Prize
Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize
Silver Medalist for the Arthur Ross Book Award
of the Council on Foreign Relations
Finalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award
For six months in 1919, after the end of “the war to end all wars,” the Big Three—President Woodrow Wilson, British prime minister David Lloyd George, and French premier Georges Clemenceau—met in Paris to shape a lasting peace. In this landmark work of narrative history, Margaret MacMillan gives a dramatic and intimate view of those fateful days, which saw new political entities—Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Palestine, among them—born out of the ruins of bankrupt empires, and the borders of the modern world redrawn.
Publishers Weekly
A joke circulating in Paris early in 1919 held that the peacemaking Council of Four, representing Britain, France, the U.S. and Italy, was busy preparing a "just and lasting war." Six months of parleying concluded on June 28 with Germany's coerced agreement to a treaty no Allied statesman had fully read, according to MacMillan, a history professor at the University of Toronto, in this vivid account. Although President Wilson had insisted on a League of Nations, even his own Senate would vote the league down and refuse the treaty. As a rush to make expedient settlements replaced initial negotiating inertia, appeals by many nationalities for Wilsonian self-determination would be overwhelmed by rhetoric justifying national avarice. The Italians, who hadn't won a battle, and the French, who'd been saved from catastrophe, were the greediest, says MacMillan; the Japanese plucked Pacific islands that had been German and a colony in China known for German beer. The austere and unlikable Wilson got nothing; returning home, he suffered a debilitating stroke. The council's other members horse-traded for spoils, as did Greece, Poland and the new Yugoslavia. There was, Wilson declared, "disgust with the old order of things," but in most decisions the old order in fact prevailed, and corrosive problems, like Bolshevism, were shelved. Hitler would blame Versailles for more ills than it created, but the signatories often could not enforce their writ. MacMillan's lucid prose brings her participants to colorful and quotable life, and the grand sweep of her narrative encompasses all the continents the peacemakers vainly carved up. 16 pages of photos, maps. (On sale Oct. 29) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Karl Helicher - Library Journal
On his trip to China in February 1972, President Richard Nixon exclaimed in a toast to his hosts that his visit, the first such trip by an American President, was "the week that changed the world." However, Nixon, who considered the opening of China his greatest achievement, didn't bask in his glory for long because Watergate would soon put him on the defensive for the remainder of his presidency. MacMillan (history, Univ. of Toronto; Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World) presents a lively narrative of the people, diplomacy, and pomp of this memorable visit, which was orchestrated as much by National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and Premier Zhou En-Lai as it was by Nixon and Mao. Although the visit did not resolve the major issue for the People's Republic (reunification of Taiwan with mainland China) and for the United States (terminating the Vietnam War), Nixon's visit ended decades of Chinese diplomatic isolation from most of the world and began an important Cold War-era dialog between the two nations. The author is especially good at providing historical background on China and showing how the trip's aftermath reverberated among such American allies as Britain, Taiwan, Australia, and Japan and within its Cold War nemesis, the Soviet Union. Recommended for all public and academic collections.
Kirkus Reviews
From Canadian historian MacMillan (Women of the Raj, not reviewed), a lively and thoughtful examination of the conference that ended the war to end all wars. After more than four years of carnage on a scale the world had never before seen, WWI ended with an exhausted Germany asking the exhausted Allies for an armistice based on American President Woodrow Wilson's idealistic formula for a just peace. The resulting Paris Peace Conference of 1919 aimed at redrawing the map of a Europe in which the Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires lay ruined, and rearranging a world in which new nations were struggling to emerge from those moribund colonial empires. Diverse characters came to Paris, including British Arabist T.E. Lawrence, Greek patriot Eleutherios Venizelos, Poland's Roman Dmowski, and Japan's Prince Saionji, but MacMillan (History/Univ. of Toronto) focuses on the complex relationships among the three disparate personalities who dominated the Conference: Wilson, French premier Georges Clemenceau, and British prime minister David Lloyd George (the author's great-grandfather). Bringing them vividly to life, MacMillan reviews the conference's considerable failures and accomplishments. In hindsight, the punitive disarmament and reparation terms imposed upon Germany and the accommodation of Japanese claims to Pacific territory can be seen as setting the stage for the rise of those nations' militarism. The creation of colonial mandates in the Mideast and betrayal of Arab nationalists who had fought for the Allied cause led to tensions that plague the world today. However, MacMillan disputes that the Paris arrangements led directly to WWII; decisions made afterward, sheargues, were more significant. The peacemakers made mistakes, she concedes, but "could have done much worse." Among the Conference's real achievements were the fashioning of seven European countries and Turkey out of the detritus of failed empires, the development of an International Labor Organization, and the creation of the League of Nations, which presaged the rise of the United Nations. Absorbing, balanced, and insightful narrative of a seminal event in modern history.
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