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Loading... Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Idealsby William J. Bennett
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Reasonable job at summarizing the facts and effect of the Clinton Presidency. He documents a lot of lies and stands for character. ( )Much of what Bennett says is true, but the conclusions he reaches are not my conclusions. I believe it was best that Clinton was not convicted and nothing in this very anti-Clinton book changed that belief. This book was written in 1998 and deals primarily with the Lewinsky scandal. It focuses on the public's apathy towards the President's legal, ethical, and moral failings. The book is segmented into chapters on Sex, Character, Politics, Ken Starr, Law, and Judgment. Each chapter begins with some common defenses the Clinton apologists would espouse about the Lewinsky affair. Bennett then answers each with his usual no-nonsense approach. A lot of his opinions center around the fact that the public really doesn't seem to care about what our elected officials do while in office. If the economy's good and we're not at war, then we can look the other way. He also does a good job in comparing and contrasting Lewinsky and Watergate. Not so much the actual crimes committed, but the underlying behavior and character flaws in the two men. This would have been an excellent read in late 1998 while this topic was fresh. At this time, at least for me, this has been hashed and rehashed. I knew (or at least had heard) a lot of the debunking of the Clinton defenders. It was good to see things from a sociological point of view. How an accepted behavior can lead to a "dumbing down" in what's expected of future leaders. 0.039 seconds to build listing no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0684813726, Hardcover)Don't look for President Clinton's picture in The Book of Virtues; bestselling author and former Secretary of Education William J. Bennett considers Bill Clinton uniquely unvirtuous. In the wake of the White House intern sex scandal, Bennett accuses Clinton of crimes at least as serious as those committed by Richard Nixon during the Watergate imbroglio. Rising above anti-Clinton polemics, The Death of Outrage urges the American public--which initially displayed not much more than a collective shrug--to take issue with the president's private and public conduct. Clinton should be judged by more than the state of the economy, implores Bennett. The commander in chief sets the moral tone of the nation; a reckless personal life and repeated lying from the bully pulpit call for a heavy sanction. The American people should demand nothing less, says the onetime federal drug czar. In each chapter, Bennett lays out the rhetorical defenses made on Clinton's behalf (the case against him is "only about sex," harsh judgmentalism has no place in modern society, independent counsel Kenneth Starr is a partisan prosecutor, etc.) and picks them apart. He may not convince everybody, but this is an effective conservative brief against Bill Clinton. --John J. Miller(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:17 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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