Idiots, Hypocrites, Demagogues, and More Idiots: Not-So-Great Moments in Modern American Politics
With the rise of the 24-hour news cycle, "opportunities to screw up have increased exponentially" for politicians, paving the way for this studied catalog of official gaffes. The New Yorker and Huffington Post contributor cheerily points out the worst of the ruling class in a fragmented but digestible laundry list of fubars, missteps and snafus, including the memorable (Hillary Clinton's sardonic, "I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies") to the obscure ("Six Taped Conversations that Might Lead One to Believe Richard Nixon's Oval Office was the Back Room of the Bada Bing Club"). Certain targets appear again and again, especially Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Dan Quayle, and it becomes difficult to find a page that doesn't include George W. Bush in lists such as "Bush tells 10 inadvertent truths" and "The Inebriation of George W. Bush," in which we learn that Bush doesn't know the meaning of the word "inebriated" (literally). Of course, many of these funnies come out of context, but for the politically-minded water cooler crowd, this neatly bound collection of quotables may be one of the best sources from which to pull this election cycle.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.