Customer Reviews

The Failure Factory: How Unelected Bureaucrats, Liberal Democrats, and Big Government Republicans Are Undermining America's Security and Leading Us to War

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This book makes me sick to my stomach and extremely fearful for our national security. Slimeballs from each party have infiltrated our security and military administration and are working to defeat our country from the inside. It's a hard subject to stomach but more people need to know about what's going on.

Unfortunately, Bill Gertz is not the household name he deserves to be. In the media it seems, only the propensity to lie and hew to a left-wing line brings widespread fame and fortune. Think Dan Rather, for example.

Instead, a conservative interested in the truth like Bill Gertz has to be content with a much smaller measure of fame - but he is entitled to a full measure of our respect for telling the truths the left-wing media won't allow on their pages or on their airwaves.

Here Gertz tells the story - which any intelligent American concerned with destiny of their nation can sense and see - of unelected bureaucrats who have for all intents and purposes become the government themselves.

For those who didn't pick up the bits and pieces as the stories emerged, Gertz lays them out in detail here.

For example, the absolute travesty of the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that irreparably damaged the United States in its efforts to force Iran to end its nuclear weaponry program. The NIE was under the control of Thomas Fingar, a left-wing intelligence analyst at the State Department. Gertz's examination of this tragedy - and that is not too strong a term for it - is very complete and should make your blood boil if you are a real American.

That we had a President and Secretary of State who would permit this to happen and go both uncorrected and unpunished is deplorable.

Worse, President Bush allowed his Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, to publicly contradict him on a policy issue. While the incident demonstrated the weakness of Bush, it also demonstrated the power of the careerists in our national government.

Name the major issue facing the United States and Gertz can - and does - tell you how left-wingers in the national government, with their own agenda, are making their own policies without regard for genuine national interests.

This is not a cheerful book. It is, in a way, reminiscent of Winston Churchill's attempts to rouse a sleeping England, Europe and United States from their slumber in the 1930s and to confront the dangers facing them.

Published before the recent election, Gertz includes a penetrating analysis of the Democrat Presidential contenders, one of whom obviously won the election.

"Reforming the federal government bureaucracy must be the highest priority of the President of the United States, Gertz opines. The problem is that our next President will not be taking Gertz's advice. Instead he will be listening tothe very people Gertz identifies in this chilling book.

Dark days are ahead for the United States.

Jerry

Outstanding Book Everyone needs to read
Give a great review of what is happening in our government,
that the everyday press is not looking into. It shows
how govenment employees can change what is not the
President wishes. Great Book
Great Author

This should be required reading for all you who voted for Obama. It will help you prepare for what's ahead.

I am not an expert on the minute details of foreign policy or national security, so I will take Gert'z word on the events and facts in is book. How we intepret these facts is a different matter. What is interesting here is his complaits about how unelected bureaucrats have subverted US foreign policy. It should not come as too much of a surprise that unelected bureaucrats shape policy to their own ends. High officials do face serious obstacles to achieving their aims through large public bureaucracies, given the size and complexity of these organizations (not to mention the absence of proper accounting). Bureaucrats can exercise considerable discretion, and in so doing undermine official policy. So the idea that state department bureaucrats turned on Bush because of the Iraq war is quite understandable. Gertz is probably right about that.

Gertz often comlains about liberal-minded bureaucrats, but there is a more general problem with bureaucrats of any mindset. The lesson we should learn from this book is that the Federal bureaucracies are too large to be very responsive to voters. The President and Congress cannot keep track of the daily functioning of government, so low level bureaucrats often exercise a surprising amount of discretion. Consequently, elected officials wield less influence that most people think: which means that voting matters less that many people imagine. Of course, voters are not powerless. But most of the voting public has accepted large and uncontrollable bureaucracies. Americans need to wake up to the fact that we cannot have both a free society and a bureaucratically regulated society.

That being said, I would say that the author's arguments need to be tempered with some economics. China is not the economic powerhouse that it is often made out to be. China inflates its GDP stats, and has long term problems with an ageing population. Yes there are some panda huggers, and Gertz notes, just as there were those who hugged the Soviet bear during the Cold War. But the US won the Cold War against the USSR through strong economic development. Why? Because out economy benefited from greater economic freedom. Here is where we really need to watch out for big government conservatives. Our long term security requires prosperity, and that means bringing Federal spending under control, first and foremost. We have serious problems with domestic discretionary spending and entitlements. If Mr Gertz wants to make the case for peace through strength, then he should push harder for a return fiscal sanity. Strength costs alot of money, and there is a strong case for peace through prosperity anyway.

The fact of the matter is that the Republican Congress and President Bush spent us into unprecedented debt. We can and should blame GW Bush for the recent explosion of Federal Spending. He could have vetoed some spending and proposed smaller budgets, but he chose to feed Federal bureaucracies more of our income. What we need is a return to the fiscal policy enacted by the 1994 Gingrich-Kasich Congress. That will help secure our long term economic interests, while at the same time starving the Federal bureaucracies. A smaller more manageable Federal bureaucracy might also be less prone to causing the problems discussed in this book. There you have it, two birds with one stone.

This book is probably the first of many to come. The book repeats the Hillary claim in reverse. That claim is that a secret conspiracy is the reason for inefficiencies or incompetence. However in the case of this book the finger points the other way. The book goes to great extent showing how Bush's failures weren't his fault, it was the great liberal conspiracy hiding in the civil service did him in. No attention is given to the bad decisions that have come out of the White House. However the author does mention names. He should get credit for backing up his accusations. However he goes overboard. His words are very laced with partisan rhetoric. I am sure there will be other books coming out from Administration folks saying much the same thing Gertz is saying, it is the other guy's fault we shot ourselves in the leg.

The book isn't a total failure. The book is like a collection of his famous columns in the Washington Times. He does draw attention to a few issues that need that attention. They seem to have slipped through the cracks in the media attention. Gertz broke the stories in the 90s about the Chinese influence in the country. He continues that chant in the book. He has a story all should read in the book. Gertz tells the story about Air Force General Butler of Strategic Command who went on a one man war to disarm the US military of nuclear weapons from the inside. More should be told of that disaster. Gertz also shows in very clear detail about how our political correctness is handcuffing the nation and sticking a bag over their head. It really does blind us to what the true harm is out there.

Overall it is a good easy read but lacks real meat about some of the underlying structural problems in our country.

this is an outstanding book that should be a must read by all americans, regardless of political posture. Bill Gertz is probably the only political investigative journalist alive today, and he should be read and appreciated for the information he presents to the public.

this book answered a lot of of questions i had re. why things, mostly of foreign policy, didn't get done as i expected them to...................it really makes the case that our "elected" leaders are NOT in charge...........it's scary...........

Failure Factory is a book filled with what I would consider factual information. But then there are the interpretations of those facts. In the area of maintaining America's dominance, the author seems to believe that only hard-line approaches can work. The author dismisses other approaches as deliberate undermining of America's power. I am not sure I agree with that. For me to be more comfortable with many of Mr. Gertz's conclusions, I would first like to see some professional reviews coming from all sides of the political spectrum. So far, I have been unable to find any.

Not fun to read, but very enlightning. Everyone who cares about where we are and how we got there concerning our security, should read this.