It's Getting Ugly out There
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It’s Getting Ugly Out There The Frauds, Bunglers, Liars, and Losers Who Are Hurting America JACK CAFFERTY John Wiley & Sons, Inc. It’s Getting Ugly Out There It’s Getting Ugly Out There The Frauds, Bunglers, Liars, and Losers Who Are Hurting America JACK CAFFERTY John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Copyright © 2007 by Jack Cafferty. All rights reserved Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey Published simultaneously in Canada Design and composition by Navta Associates, Inc. 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Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. For more information about Wiley products, visit our web site at www.wiley.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Cafferty, Jack. It’s getting ugly out there : the frauds, bunglers, liars, and losers who are hurting Amer- ica / Jack Cafferty. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-470-14479-4 (cloth) 1. United States—Politics and government—2001– 2. Bush, George W. (George Walker), 1946– I. Title. JK275.C34 2007 973.931—dc22 2007029083 Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Carol, my wife, my life Contents Preface / ix Prologue: This Isn’t the America I Know / 1 1 The Boy in the Bubble / 13 2 Resisting Authority / 27 3 Shame and Shamelessness in New Orleans: Bush’s Category 5 Tipping Point / 33 4 Bordering on Insanity: Illegal Immigration / 54 5 The Straw That Broke the Camel’s Back: What Port Security? / 78 6 Plan B: Stick to Broadcasting / 93 7 Till Debt Do Us Part: How Bush Is Eviscerating Our Middle Class / 103 8 You Need a Very Strong Constitution to Deal with These Guys: The Patriot Act and Other Disasters / 119 9 Culture Shock / 144 10 Dumbing Us Down and Numbing Us Down: This Administration Doesn’t Want Us to Get the Picture / 151 vii viii CONTENTS 11 Getting Sober / 177 12 Is This Really World War III? Then Let’s Start Fighting It Like It Is / 185 13 The Damage Done: Frauds and Disasters on Capitol Hill / 213 Epilogue: It’s Going to Get Even Uglier Out There in 2008 / 232 Acknowledgments / 256 Index / 257 Preface Looking back, I wish my parents, Tom and Jean Cafferty, had been emotionally equipped to do a better job of looking out for my younger brother, Terry, and me. It’s bad enough when the rich, powerful, and arrogant people we put in office tilt the playing field against citizens who are striving to make an honest go of it. This makes me want to scream—or at least rant for a few minutes a day on CNN. Sadly, the demons my parents had to fight when I was growing up weren’t the kind you get to vote out of office every couple of years. They were there with us at home. My folks were both alcoholics who, between them, were married eleven times. It would have been an even dozen, but my dad acciden- tally killed one of his fiancées. My dad had gotten a medical dis- charge from the army for a bleeding ulcer; a half-century later, he died from bone cancer, broke and alone in a V.A. hospital. My mom was so incapacitated by addictions after their divorce that she was eventually unable to hold down a job. I’m the product of a very dysfunctional, sometimes violent, Irish background. Indeed, very little of my backstory qualifies as Hallmark Card material, but it may help you to make sense of the way I see and interpret what’s going on around me. People don’t wind up with this kind of jaundiced, offbeat take on things without going through some interesting stuff. I grew up with no money and dealt with some demons of my own. I was never on a fast track from Andover to Harvard to ix x PREFACE big-media broadcasting. And this book ain’t therapy. I’m content being mildly maladjusted, with absolutely no desire to change. Through all the turbulence of my Reno, Nevada, childhood, I learned a lot about protecting oneself. My mom battled booze and painkillers and, at times, deep depression. My dad was a complex, fas- cinating man: a hard-drinking, sometimes abusive parent when drunk, but a charming, outspoken local radio and TV celebrity when sober. Whatever my parents’ heartaches and weaknesses, they taught me the importance of integrity, of truth telling, and of being able to give a man your word. I also learned from watching my dad at his best—in the studio. His gift for relating to everyday people made him a friend of the common man. People sensed that he had character and honor. Maybe some of that rubbed off on me. Reno in the 1950s was a nonstop, neon-lit 24/7 casino town where it might have seemed, at least to its gambling and quickie-divorce tourists, that anything goes. But just a brief, head-clearing ride past the city limits, there lay the vast, still unspoiled, almost primordial Amer- ican West. Winters could be brutal, the mountains and lakes were breathtakingly serene, and everything had a certain kind of black-and- white simplicity. You didn’t weasel your way out of stuff. If you said, “But that wasn’t my fault,” someone else told you, “Bullshit,” case closed. As my father once warned me, “If you get arrested, don’t ever call me when they give you that one call, because what I’ll do to you is a lot worse than what the police will do to you.” That was my father’s attitude once I was in my teens. I was in charge of taking care of myself. My dad was a force of nature to be feared. If I lied to him, I knew he’d cuff me. It was best not to try to get something over on him. When a friend of his called him one afternoon to report that he had spotted me smoking on a corner with some pals—I was thirteen and thought I was hot stuff—my dad picked me up in his car and tortured me with terrifying silence as he drove around seemingly forever. I was dying a thousand deaths. PREFACE xi Finally, he pulled into Idlewild Park and stopped the car along a lake with ducks swimming around. When he turned off the engine, all I could hear was my heart pounding. “Are you smoking?” he asked. I had barely uttered my one-syllable confession when his right hand came off the steering wheel and whacked me across the left side of my face. The blow knocked my head against the passenger window as his huge turquoise ring ripped into the side of my face. Blood ran from my mouth, nose, and ear. There was blood all over me. “Quit,” he said. Not another word was spoken as we drove back. It was five years before I lit up again. Tom Cafferty was a tough, wiry, six-foot two-inch, 175-pound mess of paradoxes. He grew up around Butte, Montana, a rugged gold, sil- ver, and copper boom town teeming with brothels, backroom casinos, saloons, and immigrant laborers from Mexico, Malaysia, and wher- ever. He and his brother, my uncle Jack, worked in their stepfather’s illegal gambling joint discreetly hidden at the rear of a cigar store. By the age of sixteen, my uncle Jack was dealing cards there. Later he worked the gambling boats off the coast of Long Beach, California. He and my dad ended up in Reno the first time in the 1930s. My dad worked racking chips around the roulette wheel at the Palace Club in between spins of the little white ball. Not exactly a stop on your Chelsea or Santa Monica art gallery circuit.