2010 Archives

During the time you're reading these words, somewhere in the world somebody is getting onto or off an airplane with a few ounces of cocaine, heroin, or diamonds packed into a condom and stuffed up their rear. The cocaine, heroin, or diamonds could just as easily be enough C4 plastic explosive to blow out the side of a plane, easily molded to fit into a condom. Easily removed in an airplane lavatory and detonated. Why isn't anybody discussing this?

Some book reviews write themselves, because the book is so clear and articulate and easily read, and the information in it so straightforward that all the reviewer needs to do is lay it out.

Will Bunch, the author of the brilliant Reagan biography "Tear Down This Myth," has done it again. His latest book, "Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama," is an extraordinarily readable, vividly real-to-life and broad-in-scope view of the Tea Party movement - this book could have been a movie. Bunch's writing style is so evocative that he brings every sense - sight, smell, sound etc. - to Tea Party movements and activities all across the United States, bringing to life in all its insane glory this bizarre, right-wing phenomenon sweeping our nation.

With any book, one of the most important pieces of that work is its frame or context. In “Rules for Radicals,” Saul Alinsky lays out his largest frame brilliantly in his chapter “The Purpose” when he talks about class distinctions.