It's Getting Ugly Out There

Jack Cafferty

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."

Sujets

• Political Science
• Liars (banda)
• The Situation Room
• Federal government of the United States
• General officer
• CNN
• Politics of the United States
• General
• Liars
• Jack Cafferty
• Cable News Network

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 16 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781118039250
• Langue: English

Extrait

Table of Contents
 
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Preface
Prologue
 
Chapter 1 - The Boy in the Bubble
Chapter 2 - Resisting Authority
Chapter 3 - Shame and Shamelessness in New Orleans
Chapter 4 - Bordering on Insanity
Chapter 5 - The Straw That Broke the Camel’s Back
Chapter 6 - Plan B
Chapter 7 - Till Debt Do Us Part
Chapter 8 - You Need a Very Strong Constitution to Deal with These Guys
Chapter 9 - Culture Shock
Chapter 10 - Dumbing Us Down and Numbing Us Down
Chapter 11 - Getting Sober
Chapter 12 - Is This Really World War III?
Chapter 13 - The Damage Done
 
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Index

Copyright © 2007 by Jack Cafferty. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey Published simultaneously in Canada
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Cafferty, Jack.
It’s getting ugly out there : the frauds, bunglers, liars, and losers who are hurting America / 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
For Carol, my wife, my life
Preface
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 accidentally killed one of his fiancées. My dad had gotten a medical discharge 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 big-media broadcasting. And this book ain’t therapy. I’m content being mildly maladjusted, with absolutely no desire to change.
Through all the turbulence of my Reno, Nevada, childhood, I learned a lot about protecting oneself. My mom battled booze and painkillers and, at times, deep depression. My dad was a complex, fascinating man: a hard-drinking, sometimes abusive parent when drunk, but a charming, outspoken local radio and TV celebrity when sober. Whatever my parents’ heartaches and weaknesses, they taught me the importance of integrity, of truth telling, and of being able to give a man your word. I also learned from watching my dad at his best—in the studio. His gift for relating to everyday people made him a friend of the common man. People sensed that he had character and honor. Maybe some of that rubbed off on me.
Reno in the 1950s was a nonstop, neon-lit 24/7 casino town where it might have seemed, at least to its gambling and quickie-divorce tourists, that anything goes. But just a brief, head-clearing ride past the city limits, there lay the vast, still unspoiled, almost primordial American West. Winters could be brutal, the mountains and lakes were breathtakingly serene, and everything had a certain kind of black-and-white simplicity.
You didn’t weasel your way out of stuff. If you said, “But that wasn’t my fault,” someone else told you, “Bullshit,” case closed. As my father once warned me, “If you get arrested, don’t ever call me when they give you that one call, because what I’ll do to you is a lot worse than what the police will do to you.” That was my father’s attitude once I was in my teens. I was in charge of taking care of myself.
My dad was a force of nature to be feared. If I lied to him, I knew he’d cuff me. It was best not to try to get something over on him. When a friend of his called him one afternoon to report that he had spotted me smoking on a corner with some pals—I was thirteen and thought I was hot stuff—my dad picked me up in his car and tortured me with terrifying silence as he drove around seemingly forever. I was dying a thousand deaths.
Finally, he pulled into Idlewild Park and stopped the car along a lake with ducks swimming around. When he turned off the engine, all I could hear was my heart pounding. “Are you smoking?” he asked. I had barely uttered my one-syllable confession when his right hand came off the steering wheel and whacked me across the left side of my face. The blow knocked my head against the passenger window as his huge turquoise ring ripped into the side of my face. Blood ran from my mouth, nose, and ear. There was blood all over me. “Quit,” he said. Not another word was spoken as we drove back. It was five years before I lit up again.
Tom Cafferty was a tough, wiry, six-foot two-inch, 175-pound mess of paradoxes. He grew up around Butte, Montana, a rugged gold, silver, and copper boom town teeming with brothels, backroom casinos, saloons, and immigrant laborers from Mexico, Malaysia, and wherever. He and his brother, my uncle Jack, worked in their stepfather’s illegal gambling joint discreetly hidden at the rear of a cigar store. By the age of sixteen, my uncle Jack was dealing cards there. Later he worked the gambling boats off the coast of Long Beach, California. He and my dad ended up in Reno the first time in the 1930s. My dad worked racking chips around the roulette wheel at the Palace Club in between spins of the little white ball. Not exactly a stop on your Chelsea or Santa Monica art gallery circuit. Eventually, he gravitated to Salt Lake City, where he broke into radio during its golden age, before television. There, he met and began romancing my mom, Jean Huntzinger. Once they married, they moved to Chicago, where my dad was in the army. After his discharge he worked at WGN, the huge fifty-thousand-watt clear-channel station.
I was born in Chicago on December 14, 1942. We moved on to Los Angeles while I was still a baby. My father worked as a disc jockey alongside Tennessee Ernie Ford at a country radio station there. He did some early television in L.A. and was the announcer and emcee on the Tex Williams television shows, where he worked weekly alongside the Sons of the Pioneers and other top country acts. But Reno kept tugging at his 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 was a colorful figure at parades around the state. He was treated like a visiting dignitary, waving to crowds from a sun-drenched convertible or sitting high in his silver saddle on one of the horses he kept at a ranch south of Reno. On parade days I loved going out there to help him load the horse into a trailer and then driving with him to the parade grounds, where I helped him saddle up. At that point, my dad was my hero, a larger-than-life public figure whom I tried to emulate in many ways.
Because of his huge popula