Thursday, October 18, 2012

Drift by Rachel Maddow a book review.


I am a baby boomer, was married in 1972 in a suburb of Washington, DC and have always viewed WDC as our second home. Our first home has always been New Hampshire. You can form some opinions about my point of view from my age and where I live. So as I read Rachel's book Drift, I find myself thinking about where we were and what we focused on at a corresponding time in our lives. We were dating in DC when the offices at or near the Watergate were broken into. The metro was just some huge holes in the ground. We moved back to NH due to job location and I worked the second shift and could watch the Watergate hearings on TV during the day. We grew through apartments to condos to our first home surviving gas shortages then lack of bank money to borrow for mortgages. We got kids, became successful, and had our first house built. I changed jobs a lot, traveled for work a lot. The family grew up. Not much of a book review is it?
Well how can people live through those things and be aware of the incredible shift, no drift, taking place in our countries government. We also saw the news only through the distribution given us by CBS, NBC, or ABC. I read the Boston Globe and of course disliked the Union Leader like my father and grandfather before me.
I thought Nixon was wrong and he was a crook! Ford did OK to pardon him and get things moving again. Carter was smart but got a bad deal with the Iranian hostage crisis, so did the hostages. Reagan was just what we needed a shot in the arm, then feeble at the end. I watched the North hearings and remembered Watergate. Couldn't really ever understand much but we had a family. I liked 41 even thought Sununu OK (my how times change), liked Clinton in spite of the fact that he was a caught philanderer and hated 43 and that he had used Clinton's personal life to help get elected.
We didn't know much. We raised our family voted when we were supposed to, didn't interactively affiliate with any party, you can do that passively here in NH by voting in general elections and just saying you are one or the other party.
A lot of Rachel's book is me sitting there with my mouth open, so to speak. It corroborates stories I have been told along the way by people I thought were fantasy theorists. My wife read Howard Zinn's History of the United States and said Drift reminded her of that. Rachel's book is an unvarnished look at the way we have re-framed our view of the war powers manipulation by the presidents to get us to do the right thing. Their right thing, some more ruthlessly than others. I note Rachel has sources for all she has written so if you don't trust her, go to the back and read about the sources first. Then use the Internet to validate all of them, or just realize she's a great American with a left leaning point of view that tells the truth, and read her book! Read it slowly and take notes. We need, as a nation, to get better everyday. Now I see why you dedicated this book to Vice President Cheney he deserves so much of your focus! 

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