It's Getting Ugly Out There
The Frauds, Bunglers, Liars, and Losers Who Are Hurting America
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $15.99
-
- $15.99
Publisher Description
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. -Jack Cafferty For the millions who watch the "Cafferty File" on CNN's The Situation Room, Jack Cafferty stands for common sense-the much-needed voice of reason who skewers right-wing nut jobs and liberal eggheads alike. For years, he's voiced the views, hopes, and fears of the average American in inimitable style. Now, in It's Getting Ugly Out There, he brings that level-headed wisdom to bear on the most critical issues facing us today-and explains why Americans must take our country back from those who are harming it. "It's been a target-rich seven years for someone like me who enjoys pushing people's buttons and sticking pins in things that need pricking, from rich and fatuous celebrities offering foreign policy analysis to the latest lying Beltway blowhard impaling himself on his sword of pomposity. . . . Anyone familiar with my daily 'Cafferty File' segments on CNN's The Situation Room knows I'm not exactly what you'd call the mainstream media's poster boy for feel-good news and commentary. In your face is more like it." "I'm no shrink, but I have the sense Bush has carried an angry chip on his shoulder much of his pampered life, seething just beneath the good-old-boy surface." "The bottom line is that our government no longer works for us. The government works for the lobbyists who have had a big hand in influencing (if not helping to draft) legislation favoring not the average American citizen but instead big business: health insurance, pharmaceutical and oil companies, and defense contractors, among others. These are the guys who can make the kinds of political contributions that are needed to finance today's multi-million-dollar political campaigns."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
His deep, fatherly voice may evoke the comfort of an old-fashioned, Conkrite-era news broadcast, but newsman Cafferty has made a career of saying whatever he damn well pleases: "I get paid to ask questions I don't know the answers to and to complain about the things that bother me." Reading the television news correspondent's first book feels much like watching his segments on CNN's The Situation Room, in which he follows a similarly straightforward formula: denounce bad leadership, media shortcomings and government missteps with a satirical tone just above withering. From Katrina to Iraq, from immigration to terrorism, from Bush-baiting to big business, Cafferty admits to "saying some pretty outrageous stuff" in order to get his audience riled up. Aside from skewering congress, shaming rich white guys, and repudiating Anna Nicole (the "peroxide blonde never-was"), Cafferty sheds some light on his own life, sharing personal episodes about disrespecting his boot camp drill sergeants and letting his terrier defecate in the lobby of the Des Moines television station for which he was working. Without his rich vocal presence, Cafferty's tough talking cynicism can become grating, but also cuts through, with ease, a media climate thick with rigid ideology and tabloid excess.
