West, Jonathan, Tragedy of Freedom: An Indictment of Liberal Democracy and a Call for Patriotic Resistance, (West Conshohocken, PA: Infinity Publishing, 2006.) $14.95.

Review by Ryan Setliff

An Indictment of Liberal Democracy

Author Jonathan West grew up in liberal family, attended college in Washington, DC, during the tumultuous Vietnam era. There he witnessed the subversion of America by New Left radicals who made heroes of our nation’s communist enemies. During this time, West underwent an epiphany and became convinced that the democratic system itself, which coddles subversives, is the culprit. West laments, “Liberals recreated the American soul, first in the media and then in the teachings and textbooks of America’s schools. By the time the Viet Nam war was underway, the real battle was already over.” The liberal intelligentsia succeeded in sapping “America’s children” “of their national character, their cohesion and vision. In place of these stood attributes of ethnic pluralism, leftist self-hate, and alienation” (p. 90.)

Unlawful Government: Preserving America in a Post-constitutional Age by Wilton H. Strickland (West Conshohocken, PA: Infinity Publishing, 2006), Amazon.com $11.95.

Publisher's Description

Unlawful Government presents historical and legal evidence to argue that the federal government has utterly cast off its constitutional limitations, thereby transforming America from a voluntary, civil society into a compulsory, political one. Such massive concentration of political power in one entity’s hands contradicts both the law and the modern world, whose hallmarks are decentralization, competition, and individual freedom. The book ultimately recommends that States and local communities re-assert their independence, either immediately or incrementally, in order to unravel the illicit federal power and to allow diverse communities to pursue their priorities free from unlawful federal intrusion.

Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy by Bruce Bartlett. Hardcover: 320 pages. (New York, NY: Doubleday, 2006) Amazon Price: $16.38.

An Imposter, a Pretend Conservative!!

Bush came into office riding on a tide of popular backlash directed at the scandal-plagued Clinton administration. Bush even went so far as to present himself as the consummate Reaganite. Nonetheless, G.W. Bush’s last few years of leadership from foreign policy to domestic issues have been uninspiring and characterized by a profound increase of government spending, record budget deficits, an exploding national debt, a reckless interventionist foreign policy, and a post-9/11 barb-wiretapped police state that completely eviscerates the Bill of Rights.

The ill-conceived 2005 Bush nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court marked the dramatic opening of a fissure within Republican ranks over the sitting President. Miers had no judicial bench experience but was rather a lottery commissioner with questionable business dealings, and she was a financial contributor to the Democratic Party. In fact, many professed Republican stalwarts began to question Bush’s leadership once and for all after this lamentable move.

The Bush track record speaks for itself. On foreign policy, the avoidable Iraq War was justified on false pretenses of an elusive national security threat that was never substantiated. It was all to overthrow a dictator that the United States hypocritically propped up and supported for two decades. By 2004, at the behest of his spin-doctors, Bush was campaigning for reelection and boasting that his administration was trying to spread global democracy to the four corners of the earth. The elusive Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) went down the Orwellian memory well. He simply found a new neo-Jacobin rationale for his foreign meddling and the Iraq War which is all the more spurious. His economic, fiscal and budgetary track record is no less problematic. As Bartlett documents, Bush never vetoes spending bills coming out of Congress, and he has presided over the largest budget deficits in history. His economic and fiscal policies are misguided and reckless. The U.S. government is one step away from insolvency, and may soon turn to monetary inflation in order to pay its bills.