Book Review - F*ck Feelings

Despite its provocative title, F*ck Feelings is a common sense, if somewhat contrarian self-help book written by Dr. Michael Bennett and his daughter Sarah (pseudonyms, we are told, and about which more later).

F*ck Feelings’s central conceit is that life is hard and a struggle to be managed, not a problem to be solved. The authors cast a skeptical eye that therapy can provide complete answers, but rather, should offer its patients coping skills and techniques to address their underlying issues – be those dicey familial relationships, difficulties at work, broken hearts, or just plain old capital “A” assholes we all have to deal with in our everyday lives. The book moves at a steady clip through a variety of topics while illustrating challenges through scenarios described by patients. I found some of these too pat – the women dating guys who deal drugs or the parents whose children refuse to leave the roost; however, they were useful in acting as a jumping off point for the authors to, as they put it, hope for but cannot have, what we can legitimately expect, and how to use move forward knowing this information.

If most self-help gurus pitch people on a better tomorrow if they simply change their habits or meditate or convince themselves of their own badassery, learn how to love themselves, or unclutter their homes, Dr. Bennett and Ms. Bennett encourage you to trim your sails and accept that life will deal you many harsh blows, often for no good reason and that self-improvement is certainly a goal one should aspire to, even if the benefits are temporary while the underlying problems are permanent. This is sound advice and whether it requires tip toeing around a toxic co-worker or objectively analyzing the behavior of a friend when you are in need, sweeping aside the magical unicorn thinking in favor of making emotion-free decisions about your course of action is refreshing (in the former, avoid engaging if at all possible, in the latter, cutting bait if it is clear the person is not capable of being there for you).

And if this sounds limiting to some, I found it realistic. The authors honor the fact that some people simply struggle more than others and encourage readers to reward (and applaud) themselves for getting through days or weeks of depressive fog even it means simply showing up to life and doing the bare minimum to get through the day. For others who cannot reconcile with difficult parents, get spouses to take co-ownership of their marriages, or seem to get through to a jerky boss, the authors encourage realism – people will not change simply because you want them to and pointing out a boss’s failings is likely to lead to defensiveness, not support. In other words, instead of tilting at these windmills, F*ck Feelings encourages the tactical retreat and the power of keeping your mouth shut.

My one complaint has to do with authors’ use of pseudonyms. While I understand the interest in confidentiality, the inability to verify is troubling. Of course, one assumes Simon & Schuster vetted the authors Bennett before signing them to a contract, but still, the reader’s inability to make their own judgment is a small black mark on an otherwise enjoyable read.

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Shocking, Vulgar, and Indisuptably True

So said Tucker Carlson, who related a story about Donald Trump. Way back when, Tucker insulted Trump’s hair and Trump left a message for Carlson to the effect of “you may have better hair than me, but I get more pussy than you.” Shocking. Vulgar. Indisputably True (per Carlson).

 

While I agree with none of Carlson’s politics, his pithy summation of Trump’s ability to zero in on someone and level them with a withering insult is what has dispatched each and every one of his competitors during this election cycle. George W. Bush may have had a false cowboy’s swagger, but Trump is an unabashed, in your face, New York bully. Jeb Bush? Low Energy. Ted Cruz? Born in Canada. Hillary Clinton? No lectures about women from someone married to Bill Clinton. Fox News? You need me more than I need you. No one can question the results. Bush went from front-runner to after thought. Cruz has been on a downward trajectory ever since he started tangling with Trump. Bill Clinton’s favorability ratings have sunk and his presence on the campaign trail is very low key. Fox News was left scrambling when Trump pulled out of their most recent debate and was left with egg on its face.  

 

Trump’s criticisms are shocking to the political class and can be vulgar (I am not so sure about the indisputably true part), but in the same way Simon Cowell became a massive celebrity when American Idol first aired because he was rude and cutting in his insults (which usually contained a grain of truth), Trump zeroes in on a flaw and defines the person by it. He is unafraid of the blowback and, if anything, relishes it. He has taken the political playbook everyone is supposed to follow and ignored it. In the balance, he has given voice to a disaffected group in our country who only wish they could, to borrow from a dated 1970s cliché, tell their boss to take this job and shove it.

 

Love him or hate him, he unleashes his opinions without mercy and generates strong opinions. In Howard Stern’s 1997 movie Private Parts there is a scene between two executives at WNBC, the radio station Stern worked at in the mid-1980s. The two had commissioned a survey to understand Stern’s popularity and found that the people that hated Stern listened to the show twice as long as the people who loved him. The reason was the same for both groups - they wanted to hear what he would say next. Trump has mastered that same formula, and every thought piece that insults him, every media outlet that tries to mock him, and every rival who attempts to dethrone him, has no idea what to do about it.   

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Book Review - Dreamland

Americans really love drugs. If it can be quaffed, huffed, snorted, smoked, swallowed, inhaled, or injected, chances are we have figured out how to use it to get us high. We are, after all, the country that has extracted a buzz from bath salts, Redi Whip, Robitussin, lighter fluid, and aerosol cans before even rolling a single joint, measuring out a line of cocaine, or dropping one piece of LSD-soaked blotter paper on our tongues.

Today, the scourge of opiate addiction is in the spotlight and a clear line has been drawn between the overprescribing of prescription pain medications, heroin use, and a skyrocketing number of overdoses across the country. That story is told with great eloquence by Sam Quinones, whose recently published book Dreamland is an invaluable source for people who want to understand how this phenomenon happened. Quinones’s story is, in many ways, quintessentially American. A primary focus of the book is the Mexican town of Xalisco, Nayarit, home to hard scrabble farmers who show that most cherished of American traits – the entrepreneurial spirit - to devise a new method of delivering heroin to the U.S. that owed more to McDonald’s than the Mafia. From this remote part of Mexico, these men set up shop in small and mid-sized cities, avoided violent crime, paid salaried drivers to deliver their dope, and followed-up with their customers to ensure loyalty and satisfaction. That the drivers were expendable – if arrested, they rarely carried a meaningful amount of drugs and never had weapons, so they were simply deported, to be replaced before they made it home – did not use the product, and delivered like Domino’s Pizza, generated massive profits for these drug traffickers while, for a time, flying under the radar screen of law enforcement.

Meanwhile, a revolution in the way doctors interacted with and treated patients created a massive potential customer base for the Xalisco Boys. Based largely on a one paragraph letter in a medical journal published in 1980 that claimed a mere 1% addiction rate among patients prescribed pain killers and to a lesser extent the move toward managed care, which deemphasized doctors taking time to work with patients in favor of a more factory line approach, pain management shifted from a holistic approach of exercise, weight loss, and lifestyle changes to one dominated by the prescription pad. Where once doctors limited the use of Percocet, Vicodin, and OxyContin, they began doling out these highly addictive medications like candy. Oxy became a particularly pernicious choice because its effect mimicked heroin so closely. When patients could no longer afford the drug, the Xalisco black tar heroin slid in as a replacement. That the drug, cheap, reliable, and potent, was basically delivered to your door step removed much of the risk – of being arrested or victimized – that typically affects drug users.  

Mix it all together, and you get an epidemic that hit communities at all rungs of the income ladder while lurking largely in the shadows as more well-to-do families shunned publicizing their loved one’s struggles because of the stigma associated with heroin addiction. What was once a drug associated with dirty needles, seedy motels, and lost jazz legends had migrated into the suburban McMansions of upper middle class America.

Quinones does an excellent job tracing these two narratives as they inexorably converge to a single point. His chapters are brief, usually no more than a few pages, as he ping pongs between the sugarcane fields of Mexico to decimated cities like Portsmouth, Ohio, hard by the Kentucky border and a sort of “patient zero” of economic decline that morphed into a hub of pill mills (doctor’s offices where any ache or pain was treated with hard core opiates) that begat junkies who burgled and bartered for the black tar heroin that became a substitute for pharmaceutical opiates when the authorities shut down these rogue operations.

The human toll is devastating. As the dual tracks of prescription drug abuse and heroin addiction converge in cities across the country, the destruction of millions of families fall in their wake. Even as law enforcement gets wise to the Xalisco tactics, their victories are short-lived, if not pyrrhic. Cells are quickly reformed and even as dealers and drivers are shipped back to Mexico or locked away in prison, the wave of black tar continues largely unabated. Threaded through this catastrophe is the impact of deindustrialization in rural parts of Appalachia, where the unemployed seek out disability diagnoses to collect Medicaid which in turn allows them to receive the opiates they use or sell and, on the other side of the spectrum, the easy access to addictive pain pills provided to wealthy suburbanites who can easily afford their addiction even after they cross the line to heroin.

The book offers a few grace notes. There are the addicts who get treatment and kick their habit, the researchers, doctors, and government bureaucrats who try to raise the alarm on overprescribing, and the law enforcement officers doing what they can to fight this often invisible foe. In their stories you see the humanity beneath the darkness, the unheralded attempts to help that go on behind the scenes, and the small victories that can accumulate over time. Indeed, the clear shift in how opiate addiction is treated by law enforcement speaks volumes about how policy can change. Instead of the harsh penal consequences of three strikes laws and mandatory minimum sentences that defined the “war on drugs” in the 1980s and 1990s, the focus is now on treating addiction, arming police officers with Narcan to revive those who overdose, and encouraging families to speak out when loved ones succumb to their inner demons. That so many lives have been destroyed  to get to that point is a story that Quinones tells beautifully.

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Do Not Waste Your Vote On Bernie Sanders

I was born in 1970. I have no recollection of Watergate or Jerry Ford taking a tumble down the stairs as he alit from Air Force One. My earliest political memories are of Jimmy Carter hosting the Camp David summit and American hostages being held in Iran. But from before I was a teenager until I was old enough to (legally) drink, Republicans inhabited the White House. It was an awful time for Democrats - Dukakis in a tank and Mondale losing 49 states. As someone born smack dab in the middle of Nixon’s first term, a Democrat had been in the White House for a mere four years of my life until January 20, 1993.

 

I worked for Bill Clinton in 1992. I was in Little Rock on election night and the sheer euphoria of a Democrat finally winning back the White House is a feeling I still remember. But for Democrats born in 1975 or 1980 or beyond, their relationship to our party’s hold on the Presidency is far different. It is taken for granted that a Democrat can be President. If you are 35 years old, you probably have vague memories of George H.W. Bush, but otherwise, you have lived through four terms of Democratic Presidents with the utter failure of W in between.

 

In other words, you do not really appreciate what it was like to lose five of six Presidential elections or how hard Democrats had to work to elect a President in your lifetime. So maybe you do not think it is a bad decision to support Bernie Sanders because the causes he believes are ones you do too. You might also believe that a Sanders win would mean a tidal wave of progressive votes that would sweep massive Democratic majorities into both houses of Congress, thus resulting in passage of every pet policy you hold dear – Medicare for All, drastic cuts to the Department of Defense, a minimum wage increase, huge tax increases on the wealthy – and on and on.

 

But such a belief is pure fantasy. Putting aside the gerrymandered Congressional districts that make it all but impossible to flip the House (and thus, smothering any dream you might have of getting a President Sanders agenda through Congress) and the fact that Democrats would have to carry 14 Senate races to gain a filibuster-proof majority (another impossibility), two of the biggest landslide Republican victories in history occurred when Democrats nominated so-called “liberal” candidates – George McGovern in 1972 and Walter Mondale in 1984. Each lost all but one state in the nation (and two other landslides, Reagan in 1980 and Bush 41 in 1988 were almost as bad).

 

Why hand Republicans a gift like a peacenik who will be portrayed as wanting to crush our economy under massive tax increases? Democrats have assiduously cultivated the so-called “Blue Wall” (18 states plus the District of Columbia) since 1992, winning what now equal 242 electoral votes in six straight elections. This formula is based on moderation, not revolution. The suburban soccer moms of Montgomery County (Pa.), bellwether voters of Macomb County (Mi.) and the once rock ribbed Republican enclave of Orange County (Ca.) that are now reliably Democratic are not looking to burn down the system and are not going to entrust the nuclear codes to a 74 year old socialist from Vermont.

 

And to older voters, you should know better. To me, this has the vague feeling of 2000, when just enough people voted for Ralph Nader thinking there was no difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush to nudge the election in the latter’s favor (and do not just look at Florida and its contested vote. Check out New Hampshire, which Gore lost by 1.2% with Nader getting 3.7% of the vote. It’s the only time between 1992 and 2012 that the Democrats lost New Hampshire and would have given Gore the White House regardless of Florida).

 

Bernie may inhabit the fever dreams of ultra-lefties like the editorial board of The Nation, but the same true believers who thought the country would rally to George McGovern (he got 38% of the vote) are fooling themselves if they think Bernie Sanders has any chance of being elected President. Younger voters, who came of age under Obama can be excused for thinking that someone of Sanders’s political leanings could win a national election, but older voters should appreciate the risk of entrusting our party’s nomination to someone who is not even a Democrat and whose defeat would signal not just risks to things like the Affordable Care Act, but any chance of “flipping” the Supreme Court for decades to come. This election is far too important to throw away your vote on a gadfly from Vermont who has zero chance of ever being elected President.

 

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Obamacare Is Working ... Pass It On

Ever since Barack Obama made universal health insurance a defining feature of his first term in office, the Republican Party has engaged in a relentless campaign to destroy what we now refer to as “Obamacare.” During the bill’s movement through Congress, they threw up every legislative obstacle, ginned up protests and rowdy town halls, and attempted to sow fear with ominous warnings of death panels and government bureaucrats coming to pull the plug on granny. Once the law passed, immediate legal challenges cropped up attempting to stop implementation of the law, questioning its constitutionality, and otherwise gumming up the arteries of the legal system in a Hail Mary attempt to stop millions of people from gaining health insurance. Just this week, Congress held its 62^nd vote to repeal Obamacare, finally getting its symbolic victory so that the President can stamp “VETO” when it lands in his inbox. 

It was an odd and discomfiting experience, what with the fact that the law was modeled on an idea originally proposed by the Heritage Foundation and promised to hand health insurers millions of new customers all while maintaining our inefficient, privately-run system for health care delivery in the country. Regardless, weeks and weeks of coverage were provided on everything from a glitchy website to supposed insurance death sprials to claims that the new law would destroy jobs. All reported breathlessly by a media more than happy to ape Republican talking points without ever digging into their veracity. Of course, none of these things occurred, not that you would have noticed because the media had already moved on without bothering to issue corrections. Chuck Todd demanded an apology from President Obama when healthcare.gov was not working, but never proferred a mea culpa of his own once the program was up and running smoothly, helping millions find health insurance.

Comes now an editorial in the Washington Post that examines the three-legged stool of measuring Obamacare’s success: enrollment, cost control, and employment. On all three scores, the Affordable Care Act has delivered – big time. 

Enrollment: Before the Affordable Care Act passed, an estimated 18.5 percent of the adult population in America under the age of 65 was without health insurance. In 2015, that number dropped to 10.5 percent, a reduction of about 45 percent. As the editorial notes, that percentage would be even lower if all 50 states, instead of just 30, had expanded Medicaid coverage under the ACA. It is worth noting that if all 50 states had expanded Medicaid, the roughly 9 percent of American adults under 65 without health insurance is in line with pre-ACA estimates provided by the Congressional Budget Office. 

Cost Control: Here we have two points to consider. The first is whether the ACA did anything to rein in insurance rates that used to go up considerably year-to-year; the second is what impact the Medicare cost control measures included in the ACA did to reduce costs in that program. On both counts, the ACA has succeeded. Prior to Obamacare’s passage, it was estimated that health care expenditure rates would increase by 5.5 percent in 2013 and 7 percent in 2018. In reality, expenditures only increased 3.6 percent in 2013 and are now only estimated to go up by 5.3 percent in 2018 – huge cost savings. Similarly, the rise in premium rates and medical costs since the passage of the ACA have been well below what they were in the decade prior to its passage and the actual costs are lower than what were estimated by the CBO when the law passed. 

On the Medicare front, the cost savings should make any green eyeshade deficit hawk swoon. In 2009, the CBO expected the government to spend $723 billion on Medicare in 2015. The actual amount? $634 billion - $90 billion less than predicted. Extrapolate those savings out over a decade and you have “saved” almost $1 trillion. Not too shabby. 

So, the Affordable Care Act has cut the number of uninsured by nearly half, cost less than predicted, and saved Medicare tens of billions of dollars. But what about jobs? Republicans kept telling us that Obamacare would be a jobs killer. Not so. The past two years have been gang busters for employment. The jobless rate is now at just 5% and the economy has created millions of new, mostly full-time jobs in the process. 

That the good news is largely unreported is unsurprising. Humdrum stories of government functioning as intended (and even a little better) are not nearly as interesting as whatever insult Donald Trump has lobbed at an opponent today, but to the people who have benefitted from the Affordable Care Act, I suspect this is, as Vice President Biden said, a big fucking deal.

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Book Review - Ghettoside

The statistics are as eye-popping as they are depressing: 158 black men out of every 100,000 between the ages of twenty and twenty-four is murdered in America, a rate somewhere between twenty and thirty times the national average. Although blacks make up just 13% of our country’s population, nearly 60% of adult males in a federal, state, or local correctional facility are black. At a time when the Black Lives Matter movement and politicians of all stripes are focusing on the interaction between law enforcement and predominately black communities, far less attention is paid to the everyday incidences of black-on-black violence that drive these alarming numbers.

Into this void steps Jill Leovy, whose book Ghettoside tracks the work of Los Angeles Police Department detectives in one of the highest crime areas of that city. Leovy’s lens, like the city she chronicles, is wide and ranging, using the murder of a detective’s son who was murdered by gang members even though his own involvement in a rival crew was tangential at best as the central story point, but as she dips in and out of the lives of police officers, citizens, criminal defendants, and lawyers who are the protagonists and antagonists in what is a seemingly never-ending story of murder and mayhem, we get a much more nuanced view of how their lives and stories intersect.

Leovy makes a compelling argument that inner city violence is to a certain degree a reaction by people who do not believe the criminal justice system will provide the ends it purports to offer, resulting in a rebellion against it, a process of street justice that substitutes retaliation for prosecutors, courtrooms, and prison sentences while at the same time discouraging cooperation with the police. In a segregated area of despair, where jobs are hard to come by, schools are substandard, the peer pressure applied by young men who see little chance of surviving to see their twenty-first birthday, and the seeming indifference of those who are paid to protect and serve, perhaps this attitude is understandable, but this nihilistic world view cannot excuse a complete erosion of the social contract to the point where it is acceptable to resolve petty squabbles and beefs with gunfire and a generation of newborns, infants, and toddlers grow up without one or both of their parents, burdening older grandparents, aunts, uncles and the foster care system while their mothers and fathers are spending years in prison or are dead. 

Leovy gets the broad strokes right - showing what dedicated police detectives can do to achieve justice for victims of violent crime even though the victims are not all innocent, the challenges people in the community face when their options are helping the police or risking the wrath of retaliatory violence, and how the slow gears of justice can often impede its achievement. The book’s main character, a detective named John Skaggs, is a no non-sense guy who pours his heart and soul into his job, does not suffer fools gladly, and operates by a code of conduct that is admirable but often puts him in conflict with peers and supervisors. Leovy walks us through his process, in particular in solving the murder of Bryant Tennelle, the son of a fellow LAPD detective, whose own story flits on the margins of what many in poorer communities experience. Tennelle’s father believes in living in the community he serves, but doing so places his youngest son at risk of the predations of the streets. While Bryant was hustling legitimate jobs, his buddies were dipping their toes in gang life and his association with them ended up costing him his life. Skaggs methodically goes through the evidence, laying snippets of information next to witness statements in an exquisitely patient manner, building his case until, in a scene Leovy frames beautifully, he gets a confession from the triggerman. 

But here, we see the limitations of justice. As any Law & Order fan knows, the arrest is only half the battle. Skaggs’s defendant opts for trial, stretching the ordeal out for almost two years, impacting the lives of an accomplice who flipped and witnesses who risked retaliation to provide key information, and requiring its  investment of hundreds of hours of time by the state in preparing and proving its case. And while Tennelle’s killer is brought to justice, Leovy points out that clearance rates for murders of black males in Los Angeles do not even approach fifty percent. Imagine that - knowing that if you commit a murder you have better than a coin flip’s chance of getting away with it and conversely, that if you are a victim, your family is left knowing there is less than a 50/50 chance you will receive justice. No wonder people take matters into their own hands. 

Ghettoside also gets the small details right - the petty bureaucratic turf battles emblematic of law enforcement, the trade offs made by people living in poor communities when it comes to navigating daily life, and the one-step-forward-two-steps-back challenge they experience when trying to escape a criminal past. This is a testament to Leovy’s dogged pursuit of a compelling story and her diligence is rewarded in vignettes sprinkled throughout her book - of grieving family members holding vigil at hospital bedsides, roll calls where lieutenants try to buck up flagging morale caused by budget squeezes, and the tricky calculus experienced when witnesses are debating about whether to assist in a criminal investigation. 

Indeed, the question of “snitching” is both a prominent feature and a roadblock Leovy touches on in considering the remarkably high rates of murder in these depressed communities. It is the classic chicken or the egg problem. Residents in poor neighborhoods are reluctant to cooperate with the police, who they do not think take solving shootings and murders seriously, which makes solving shootings and murders harder, which encourages more shootings and murders, which discourages cooperation for fear of retaliation for crimes that will not be solved. Who is responsible for this cycle starting and how it can be stopped is in a way much of what Ghettoside considers. While hard working detectives like Skaggs, Nate Kouri and Sal Marullo can be counted on to take their case loads seriously and outperform the clearance rate average, many of their colleagues are either too inexperienced or indifferent to perform at a high level. It is a sad commentary that the likelihood of an arrest should be predicated on something as arbitrary as who gets assigned the case, but Leovy makes that inference clear. 

On the other hand, “ghettoside” (a term used in the book, not my own) residents often know full well who committed a crime but say nothing, either because street justice is enacted, they fear being retaliated against, or they think the police will not follow through, leaving them exposed as snitches. Of course, it is difficult to fully adopt the community lament over poor policing when so much assistance is withheld and, if given, would make the task of arresting and convicting murderers so much easier. 

And even when the police get help, securing cooperation often requires relocation, regular monitoring and check ins with people who may be unreliable, scared, or unmoored from a stable life, adding a degree of difficulty in holding cases together that Leovy points out is not seen in other, less violent parts of the city. The time and effort it takes to nurse cooperating witnesses through months and years of grueling pressure when testifying against those who they grew up with, loved, or feared is daunting and is another reason securing convictions can often be so hard. 

It is no wonder the problems of the inner city seem so intractable. When so much effort has to be put forth to not even achieve a fifty percent clearance rate on murders and so much enmity has been generated between the police and these impoverished communities, the tales Leovy tells of cooperation and commitment are a silver lining to an otherwise depressing problem. The small success Skaggs’s star witness from the Tennelle trial experiences as she puts her prior life of prostitution behind her and the continued decline of the overall murder rate notwithstanding, the high crime areas Leovy highlights are still responsible for nearly half of all the murders committed in Los Angeles. The two men who ended up going to prison for life in Bryant Tennelle’s murder are not remorseful when Leovy visits them, pleading flimsy alibis that belie any responsibility or personal accountability for their horrific actions. 

Ultimately, Leovy’s observations challenge the reader to consider unorthodox solutions. For example, the passage of a federal law, the Second Chance Act of 2005, expanded access to Supplemental Security Income, thereby providing ex-offenders with mental health disabilities the opportunity to collect a steady check from the government. While some might cringe at the idea of this form of welfare, as Leovy notes, economic flexibility affords people options that change the risk/reward calculus of criminogenic behavior. Other factors, from gentrifying neighborhoods to how illicit drugs are sold have also led to some of the decline in murders Leovy tracks. Absent though, are Leovy’s own thoughts on how these problems should be addressed. Instead, she punts to policy makers, but her silence is disappointing, for having spent years immersed in this world, she surely has insights that might prove valuable. But this is a quibble at the margins. Ghettoside is a must read for anyone interested in a behind the scenes look at the constant battle going on in pockets of our society stubbornly caught up in a generations long cycle of violence.

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Book Review - The Wilderness

While flipping through McKay Coppins’s book The Wilderness: Deep Inside the Republican Party’s Combative, Contentious, Chaotic Quest to Take Back the White House it is easy to close your eyes and envision what the GOP’s Presidential nominating contest could have looked like: a telegenic young Florida Senator who had championed immigration reform debating with an ardent libertarian who supports privacy rights over foreign wars, a bilingual elder statesman lobbying for education reform and big tent conservatism squaring off against an Indian-American Governor of a blood-red state, a silver-tongued double Ivy graduate and former Supreme Court clerk voicing the frustrations of an electorate fed up with the Washington establishment dueling with a former tech CEO who was once one of the leading female executives in the country. 

That debate, a relatively sober, yet sharp conversation about the future of our country, how our money is spent, where we deploy our troops, how we help those in need and what we do about those in our country illegally would have elevated the discourse in a party that has lost the popular vote in five of the last six Presidential elections, but sadly, it was not meant to be. A tsunami of bile and invective spewed from the mouth of an all-id billionaire named Donald Trump consumed every molecule of oxygen available for months on end, leaving the best laid plans of party leaders in ruins and a reality TV star at the head of an army of discontented voters clamoring for high walls to keep out Mexicans, a ban on Muslims entering the country, and a visceral disdain for anything that vaguely smelled of the dreaded “establishment.” 

Surely, when Coppins signed a contract with Little, Brown in June 2013 to examine how the Republican party would attempt to reclaim the White House in 2016, neither he nor they foresaw Trump’s rise. After all, the GOP was just 8 months removed from getting its clock cleaned in the 2012 election, 3 months past the issuance of a report by a a blue ribbon panel of party elders that concluded Republicans needed to do more to attract the votes of African-Americans, Hispanics, and women, and President Obama had seemingly vanquished Trump from public life with a withering takedown at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner. Against this backdrop, it certainly made sense for the writer to spend time with people like Bobby Jindal, who had noted that the GOP needed to stop being the “stupid” party, Paul Ryan, who emerged unscathed from the smoldering ruin of the Romney campaign, and Rand Paul, who TIME Magazine dubbed “the most interesting man in politics” in October 2014. 

Coppins’s research and effort is on display throughout his book, it just turned out to be largely beside the point. We get the deep dive into biographical minutiae like the exorcism Jindal participated in, Paul’s bizarre “Aqua Buddha” incident from college, the oppo research on Rubio that was never released (but that Coppins eagerly does), and Jeb Bush’s transformation from entitled rich boy to humbled public servant (eye roll). While the breadth of Coppins’s research is admirable (poor guy fished out Jindal’s Oxford thesis that supported a health care plan that looks suspiciously like Obamacare) his word choice suggests a penchant for playing favorites. Marco Rubio is described as having “unparalleled skill” as a communicator (debatable) while Paul Ryan is “genial” and “good natured.” Coppins seems particularly taken with the now House Speaker. He goes on for several chapters lauding Ryan’s  listening tour to learn about how ex-offenders and drug addicts access treatment in the community while giving a one paragraph blow off to the fact that the budgets and tax policies Ryan supported after this little policy jag bore no resemblance to the needs of these men and women. 

While it is understandable that some characters may be more compelling (or likable than others), I was more troubled by the absence of attribution throughout much of the book. The sourcing stems from Coppins’s interviews with the candidates or those around them reconstructed or summarized except where quotations are used; however, the book has no endnotes or footnotes and the sources are rarely identified by name, leaving the book with an impressionistic feel that permits thumb-on-the-scale descriptions by the author that poo poohs Ron Paul as a “kooky gadfly” but Jeb Bush as a sober elder statesman. It is this type of Acela Corridor thinking that created a blind spot in the media’s collective reporting on the GOP, dismissed Trump and refused to concede he had kneecapped Bush with a few strategic insults.  

Moreover, the book makes a few declarative statements that are at best misleading and at worst, flat wrong. A discussion of the government shutdown describes the fall-out as the government’s inability to pay its bills, which is not technically true; rather, it results in employees not being able to go to work. At another point, Coppins claims that Ryan was “a few hundred thousand swing state votes” from being elected Vice President. This is not only demonstrably false, but the predicate before it, of Ryan’s feeling self-conscious while visiting a church that helps those in need, is a perfect illustration of the attribution failure described above. Lastly, because the book had a delivery due date, it already feels outdated. Cruz, who has rocketed to second place to Trump and who none other than Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman has identified as the likely Republican nominee, is referred to as a “footnote” by Coppins and Governor Chris Christie, languishing in the polls when The Wilderness went to print, is now surging in New Hampshire. 

Ultimately, the main failing of Coppins’s book is the same one that has bedeviled the Republican party and the Beltway cognoscenti - their collective failure to anticipate Trump’s meteoric rise fueled by the deep antipathy many in the GOP feel toward their own leaders. To be sure, there were hints along the way that Coppins highlights - Cruz’s kamikaze government shutdown effort, Dave Brat’s out-of-nowhere takedown of Eric Cantor, even Trump’s appearance at an Iowa “cattle call” in early 2015 where he flatly stated the party could not nominate another member of the Bush family - but instead of focusing on these clues, much of the book lingers on also rans who never made an impact on the race. Bobby Jindal is portrayed as both a serious man of faith and one who blithely jettisoned his reputation for wonkishness when it was clear his message was not selling with the base. Rand Paul’s brand of libertarian tinged Republicanism is shaded in the Oedipal struggle he felt with his father, but ultimately, the “libertarian moment” that the pundit class keeps claiming is going to happen when a Paul family member runs for President never materialized. 

In this way, The Wilderness offers an interesting examination of a political party that does not actually exist while maintaining a blinkered view of what caused Trump’s rise. Indeed, but for a single chapter that probes into the darker recesses of right-wing thought and a couple of paragraphs at the end of the book that spotlight this phenomenon, The Wilderness is surprisingly light on what seems an axiomatic idea - that whatever humility Republicans felt after Obama’s re-election receded when the party suffered no political consequences for the 2013 government shutdown and gained seats in the 2014 Congressional elections. These results, coupled with the party’s massive gains at the state level during Obama’s time in the White House and the fall of both John Boehner and Eric Cantor, the top two Republican leaders in the House of Representatives, emboldened the right wing, not cowed it. While most GOP candidates for President were busy running the same establishment playbook, Trump upended the conventional wisdom and swooped into the chasm that exists between the most ardent Republican voters in the hinterlands and the party’s leadership in Washington. A book that told that story would have been a worthy addition to the nascent canon of 2016 reporting.

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2015 Year in Books

It is amazing how many books you can read when you essentially have no social life. Here is my year in review for 2015. You can also click these links to read my recaps from 2014, 2013, 2012, and 2011.

Book of the Year

Dog Whistles, Walk Backs, and Washington Handshakes: Decoding the Jargon, Slang, and Bluster of American Political Speech, Chuck McCutcheon and David Mark

Pithy without being sophomoric, this handy Bible of Beltway folkways is not as baldly cynical as Mark Leibovich’s This Town, is less snarky than Dana Milbank’s Homo Politcus, and far more intelligent than Chris Cillizza’s execrable The Gospel According to the Fix. These are authors who point out the absurdity of D.C. convention with bemusement rather than bile. It is light reading that any political junkie will enjoy, and, in a year with many very good, but not great books on my shelf, wins the award by default.

Runners-Up

Showdown, Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America, Wil Haygood

Haygood’s thorough (and thoroughly enjoyable) mediation on LBJ’s decision to appoint Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court reads like a political thriller that could be a story arc on House of Cards. The main players are all bold characters and big egos – Johnson, looking to cement his legacy on civil rights, Marshall, a giant of the legal community whose decades-long career fighting against white supremacy is richly detailed and truly inspiring, Senator John McClellan, a bigot of the first order looking to torpedo the nomination, and Senator Sam Ervin, whose acclaim during Watergate is mitigated by his disgraceful treatment of the eminently qualified Marshall.

In the balance, Haygood uses the extended Judiciary Committee hearings (Marshall’s ended up being the longest in history to date) to hopscotch around the months, years, and decades leading up to this event as a way to frame how far the nation needed to come simply to appoint a black man to the U.S. Supreme Court. We learn not only of the broad strokes, but even the smaller points, not the least of which was Johnson’s fear that Marshall would not make it through the hearing and had already lined up a fallback option (William Coleman, a black Republican). Marshall’s legal career is given the just due it deserves, from his time as an attorney with the NAACP, traveling at great personal risk through the Deep South,

to his time as U.S. Solicitor General and judge of the 2^nd Circuit Court of Appeals, but we also get a flavor for the man Marshall was – tough minded, a raconteur who loved good company, and constantly pushing against the injustice he saw each day.

Looking back on the lies and innuendo hurled at Marshall from a distance of nearly 50 years makes the conduct all the more revolting and it is equally troubling to think that such behavior was sanctioned and indeed encouraged in the not-too-distant past. Considering the enormous legacy Marshall left behind, we can only be grateful that he was able to overcome the naked racism displayed by those who would sit in judgment of him.

The Lost Tribe of Coney Island: Headhunters, Luna Park, and the Man Who Pulled Off the Spectacle of the Century, Claire Prentice

This heart-wrenching tale of greed takes us back to the turn of the 20^th century when a huckster named Truman Hunt brought a tribe of Pilipinos to the United States and basically turned them into a zoo exhibit at various fairs and amusement parks in the country. While these gentle people were ogled by thousands of people, their captor pocketed all the money and gambled most of it away. The legal twists and turns that resulted once these poor souls escaped his grip is equally depressing and the whole story has a stranger-than-fiction quality to it that will reaffirm any cynic’s belief in how truly awful human beings can be.

The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion & The Dark Side of Cute, Zac Bissonnette

You remember Beanie Babies, right? Cute little stuffed animals that suddenly became the Dutch tulips of the late 1990s and early 2000s? Bissonnette does a fascinating deep dive not just into the fad but the man behind it – Ty Warner – a volatile perfectionist whose monomaniacal control over the plush toy empire he created alienated everyone in his life while making him obscenely wealthy. Along the way, we meet the early adopters who were able to make bank off the fad as it escalated and a few of the suckers who were left holding the bag by buying at the top of the market.

Honorable Mention

Mastermind, How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes, Maria Konnikova

Konnikova takes the stories of the fictional detective and deconstructs them to illustrate how to think critically. A must for puzzle solvers, law students, and fans of the TV show House.

America’s Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Health Care System, Steven Brill

Why our health care system is such a shit show. Full review: http://scarylawyerguy.blogspot.com/2015/04/book-review-americas-bitter-pill.html

One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon, Tim Weiner

Nixon is endlessly fascinating to me. See, Things I Love – Richard Nixon. http://scarylawyerguy.blogspot.com/2015/08/things-i-love-richard-nixon.html My full recap of Weiner’s excellent book is here: http://scarylawyerguy.blogspot.com/2015/10/on-april-17-1973-fbi-agents-arrived-at.html

Killing A King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel, Dan Ephron

Ephron’s briskly paced story is about much more than Rabin’s murder at the hands of a religious zealot. It is about a small window of time in modern history when it seemed possible that one of the thorniest issues on the world stage would finally be resolved. Sadly, Ephron argues persuasively that with Rabin’s killing at the hands of a Jewish extremists got what they wanted – a hardening of positions by both Israelis and Palestinians that has left a solution to this problem farther than ever from being achieved. Shalom, Chaver.

The Best of the Rest

The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure, C.D. Rose

It is impossible to know if Rose’s slim tome of two-page biographies of authors you have never heard of is legitimate or an elaborate stunt, but it is entertaining. My full review:

http://scarylawyerguy.blogspot.com/2015/01/book-review-biographical-dictionary-of.html

A Letter to My Cat: Notes to our Best Friends, Lisa Erspamer

Sobbing.

Getting Back Out There: Secrets to Successful Dating and Finding Real Love after the Big Break-Up, Susan J. Elliott

Didn’t work.

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, Jon Ronson

Two takeaways from Ronson’s polemic about shaming in the age of social media: (1) shaming only works if others make you feel guilty about what you’ve done; and (2) the half-life of any shaming is approximately four nanoseconds these days. Does anyone remember the name Rachel Dolezal? Exactly.

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania, Erik Larson

Poor guy. Wrote his magnum opus (Devil in the White City) more than a decade ago, which makes all his other books pale in comparison. That said, this one’s a page turner even though you know the end result.

Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town, Jon Krakauer

Here is another guy whose literary mark was made years ago. But please read if you want to get incredibly mad about how lightly allegations of sexual assault against college athletes are treated.

Bad Days in History: A Gleefully Grim Chronicle of Misfortune, Mayhem, and Misery for Every Day of the Year, Michael Faquhar

The shittiest things that happened on every day of the year. Great bathroom and/or vacation reading. Full review here: http://scarylawyerguy.blogspot.com/2015/06/book-review-bad-days-in-history.html

1944: FDR & The Year That Changed History, Jay Winik

A reach at north of 500 pages, 1944 may have changed history, but it was more so the culmination of events that occurred in the years previous. An enfeebled and near-death FDR sucks it up to secure a fourth term in office, Eisenhower’s landing at Normandy succeeds, and someone finally gets around to liberating death camps that the Allies knew about for years beforehand but did nothing about.

America 1908: The Dawn of Flight, the Race to the North Pole, the Invention of the Model T, and the Making of a Modern Nation, Jim Rasenberger

Big year. Long subtitle. The book’s first few chapters on the Wright Brothers are particularly good, but the bigger idea here is that many of the wonders of the modern world we now take for granted were honed during this year in our nation’s history. If only TR had opted to run again instead of handing the reins to Taft.

The Real Thing: Lessons on Love & Life From a Wedding Reporter’s Notebook, Ellen McCarthy

Great read for the hopeless romantic in all of us.

Meh

Shot All to Hell: Jesse James, the Northfield Raid, and the Wild West’s Greatest Escape, Mark L. Gardner

If you’re a fan of Westerns.

The Triangle: A Year on the Ground with New York’s Bloods and Crips, Kevin Deutsch

If you’re a fan of young, underemployed, uneducated gang members solving squabbles via firearms and how impossible it is for police to get a handle on this phenomenon because so many other parts of society are fucked.

What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, Randall Munroe

Too nerdy.

It Ended Badly: Thirteen of the Worst Breakups in History, Jennifer Wright

No, no. Mine with Special Lady Friend did not rate, but Norman Mailer stabbing his wife in the heart (she survived) and some poor kid (Sporus) who was castrated and turned into a woman by Nero, did. Love hurts, y’all.

David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Baffling Giants, Malcolm Gladwell

At this point, Gladwell’s books feel like super-sized think pieces you read on Vox. 

You Are A Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life, Jen Sincero

Some combination of fake it ‘till you make it, YOLO, and Tony Robbins.

The Perfection of the Paper Clip: Curious Tales of Invention, Accidental Genius, and Stationary Obsession, James Ward

You would think a book that digs into the history of ubiquitous desktop items would appeal to someone who rated “How to Sharpen A Pencil” as one of the best books he read in 2013, but you would be wrong. I just could not get into a good flow with this one.

The Death of Elvis: What Really Happened? Charles Thompson and James Cole

I will save you the trouble – years of prescription drug abuse, an awful diet, and a cadre of sycophants who were happy to be on the payroll and keep their mouths shut. 

Superpower: Three Choices for America’s Role in the World, Ian Bremmer

Option A – W’s mindless interventionism. Option B – Old school Taft Republican isolationism; Option C – Obama’s “smart power” strategy. Your call, America.

The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia, Michael Booth

Based largely on the fact that Scandinavian countries invariably rank near the top of the “happiest” people on earth, Booth peels back the onion to reveal the quirks, idiosyncrasies and less savory aspects of life in places like Norway and Finland. Personally, I would not last one winter up there, I do not care how loose they are with vice laws or how much they soak the rich in taxes.

From Clueless to Class Act: Manners for the Modern Man, Jodi R.R. Smith

I’m never going to fucking learn how to tie a bow tie. Sorry. Oops, I meant to say, this is a slight tome with helpful hints about how to politely alight from dinner parties and writing gracious thank you notes (admittedly, a lost art these days).

Magic Words: The Science and Secrets Behind Seven Words That Motivate, Engage, and Influence, Tim David

You know the old saying “never trust a man with two first names.” Add on the fact that Tim David is also a magician (so, his business is sleight of hand) and you get this, a book that reads like a corporate seminar on how to manipulate other people.

Works Well With Others: An Outsider’s Guide to Shaking Hands, Shutting Up, Handling Jerks, and Other Crucial Skills in Business That No One Ever Teaches You, Ross McCammon

Again with the foot-long subtitle. Jesus dude, you’re an editor at a men’s magazine, clean it up a little, ok? Oh sorry. That is probably an example of what NOT to say in the work place. Otherwise, do not chit chat at the urinals (duh), drink too much at the holiday party (double duh), or piss off the boss’s assistant.

The Obstacle is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials Into Triumph, Ryan Holiday

Pete Carroll recommends this book and hey, he blew a Super Bowl on an idiotic call, so he must know something about overcoming adversity.

Not Recommended

The Smartest Book in the World, Greg Proops

If by smartest, the author meant dumbest and least funny, he nailed it.

When to Rob a Bank: And 131 More Warped Suggestions & Well-Intentioned Rants, Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt

Should have left well enough alone with Freakonomics. Copying and pasting blog posts into a book should not be a thing.

Citizens of the Green Room: Profiles in Courage and Self-Delusion, Mark Leibovich

Another writer recycling old work in the wake of a literary “success.” Awful. My full review is here:

http://scarylawyerguy.blogspot.com/2015/03/book-review-citizens-of-green-room.html

Whatever Happened to the Metric System? John Marciano

The author tries to stretch the quirky effort in America to convert to the metric system in the 1970s into a book-length history of measurement. Missed it by a mile … err kilometer.

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Deficits Do Not Matter

Before our economy blew up in 2008 and before George W. Bush invaded Iraq under false pretenses, a guy named Paul O’Neill, who you might remember as Bush’s first Treasury Secretary, was shut down by Vice President Cheney when O’Neill attempted to throw cold water on another round of tax cuts the Bushies were plotting for 2003. According to O’Neill, Cheney brusquely observed that “Reagan taught us deficits don’t matter.” The tax cuts got enacted and O’Neill was shitcanned shortly after his face-to-face with Cheney. 

But a funny thing happens any time a Democrat is handed the keys to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Suddenly, those profligate Republicans who gladly starve the government of actual money and borrow it instead, become very concerned about budget deficits and debt. It happened when Bill Clinton was President and came back with even greater force once Barack Obama took office. 

Once Republicans took over the House, and continuing when they assumed power in the Senate, any time Obama wanted to do something like extend unemployment insurance to people who were out of work because of the crippling effect of the Great Recession, there was a demand for a so-called “offset” - a dollar for dollar removal of funds from place A to fund priority B. It got so bad that emergency funding for New Jersey and New York after Superstorm Sandy was held up for weeks while Congress quibbled over the small details. That tens of thousands suffered needlessly seemed of no moment. Of course, none of this was required when George W. Bush was spending hundreds of billions in Iraq, Medicare was expanded to provide a prescription drug benefit, or when tax cuts were enacted in 2001 and 2003 that drained the Treasury of needed money just as we were embarking on that grave error of an invasion in the Middle East.

There were few voices louder in demanding austerity and cuts to social programs, while simultaneously cutting taxes even more than Paul Ryan. While his economic view was roundly panned when he was made Mitt Romney’s Vice Presidential running mate in 2012, Ryan never gave up the ghost. Now that he has risen to the third-most powerful office in the land, you would think a journalist such as Chuck Todd would devote a significant portion of time when interviewing now-Speaker Ryan about the recently enacted federal budget and a companion bill that cut taxes by nearly $700 billion over ten years. Yes, you read that right, SEVEN HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS - but you would be wrong. Here is their entire exchange:

What does this even MEAN? “by keeping taxes where they are that means we’re keeping them where they are.” Yes, yes you are, sir. “Not raising taxes is not cutting taxes.” WHAT? This is the same guy who helped block a $9.7 billion unemployment extension in 2014 because it did not have offsets and the same guy who voted against the emergency relief bill after Superstorm Sandy, but is totally fine with handing almost $700 billion in tax cuts, mostly to corporations and businesses, without cuts elsewhere to make up the difference. No mention of how this will require more borrowing and increase the deficit over time. No questioning of why it is suddenly okay to increase the deficit when it was supposedly such a huge problem less than five years ago. Nope. Nada. Nothing. 

Unsurprisingly, this steaming pile of horse manure got no follow-up from the guy who hosts the top rated Sunday morning talk show in America. The media literally spent months not too long ago obsessing over the need for a “grand bargain” that would rein in the supposedly swollen deficit that risked destroying the nation. Of course, as the budget deficit has receded, less and less time has been spent reporting on it and even less interest in calling out shameless politicians who are happy to stick it to people without jobs or a home so long as the bill being signed has a whiff of bipartisanship and a novelty beard attached to it. 

To recap, Chuck Todd asked a whole ONE question about this apparent hypocrisy, Paul Ryan gave a word salad answer that literally made no sense, and Chuck Todd moved on. So, the next time Republicans refuse to pay for something or claim we cannot afford it, do not expect Chuck Todd, or anyone else in the Beltway media to question it. 

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