Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: community builders, marshals service, feeling your pain, Justice Department, United States, White House (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Clinton-Gore years have been a catastrophe for individual liberty, writes James Bovard in this libertarian broadside:

Clinton was the Nanny State champion incarnate--the person who taught tens of millions of Americans to look to government for relief from every irritation of daily life--from child safety car seats to unpasteurized cider to leaky basements. Clinton's perennial message was that people should trust political action far more than the voluntary efforts of individuals to improve their own lives.

Bovard, a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, occasionally goes overboard--"Clinton sees government revenue as the source of all progress and all justice" and "Clinton exploited and expanded the dictatorial potential of the U.S. presidency." Yet he expertly marshals evidence to support his thesis that "no aspect of Americans' lives was too arcane for federal intervention" during the Clinton years. He notes that the average two-earner family's total tax burden rose three times faster than inflation, that the IRS has collected tens of billions of dollars in wrongful penalties and taxes not owed, and that the Justice Department has seized more than $600 million in private property, even though "the vast majority of people whose property is seized by federal agents are never formally charged with a crime." Bovard also takes extended looks at AmeriCorps, affirmative action, the war on drugs, agriculture policy, Waco, and more--and at every turn he sees an unmitigated calamity. His chapter on disaster relief is especially good, showing how the Federal Emergency Management Agency is "determined to spend tax dollars to rescue citizens, regardless of how irresponsible or negligent they have been and regardless of whether they have requested help." Bovard is an upscale, libertarian version of bestselling author Martin L. Gross, and Feeling Your Pain will appeal to readers interested in muckraking accounts of the welfare state and its blunders. --John J. Miller

From Library Journal

Despite Bill Clinton's claim that the era of big government is over, Bovard (Freedom in Chains) portrays the President's terms in office as a nightmarish progression of unconstitutional federal intrusion into the individual rights of citizens. Bovard, a libertarian who believes that little government is the best government, calls for the dismantling of federal agencies, most notably the IRS, the FBI, and HUD. He convincingly shows how poorly planned and executed government responses contributed to the tragedies of Ruby Ridge in 1992 and Waco the following year, but he is silent about how the anti-government beliefs of Timothy McVeigh led to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. In addition to President Clinton, Bovard holds special contempt for Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI director Louis Freeh. The author relies on the assumption that charity and the inherent good will of people will provide an adequate safety net for the poor in the absence of federal programs. Although Bovard's views and remedies will trouble moderates, he documents in exacting detail numerous examples of government gone mad. This controversial work gives the reader much to ponder. Recommended for public libraries.DKarl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 426 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; 1st edition (September 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312230826
• ISBN-13: 978-0312230821
• Product Dimensions: 9.9 x 6.6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,754,665 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

89 of 94 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Puts It All in Perspective, July 30, 2000

By	Thomas Kearney (Plainview, New York United States) - See all my reviews

Bovard provides us with the big picture regarding the policies of the Clinton Administration, whereas the media has only looked at certain things in isolation. Coming in the wake of the Danforth Commission on Waco, which claims to absolve the government of any fault in the death of the Branch Davidians, Bovard devotes a chapter of his book to the incident. Like many people at the time of the conflagration, I was one of those Americans who thought, "Well, they were a bunch of religious fanatics, whattaya expect?" Therefore, it should be rather sobering to read in "feeling your pain" that BATF agents could have arrested Koresh at any time when he went into town prior to the raid, and that at one point Koresh even invited the ATF to come and inspect the compound, but they refused the invitation. Instead, they opted for a military raid to be covered by the media to bolster the agency's image in the minds of the American people. A lost tv cameraman inadvertently tipped the Davidians off, but knowing this, the ATF tried to storm the compound anyway. The rest, as we know, is history.

Civil libertarians should be troubled by the attempts of the administration to limit privacy over our internet commmunications and in banking. The book also gives a good summary of why the military intervention in Kosovo was such a blunder. Interestingly, I just read in the paper this morning that an American serviceman pleaded guilty to raping and murdering an ethnic Albanian girl in Kosovo. Is this what Clinton meant by a humanitarian intervention? Other areas covered include the War on Drugs, agricultural policy, HUD abuses and gun control efforts.

I had recently read Bovard's previous book, Freedom In Chains, which I gave 5 stars. One of the weaknesses of "feeling your pain" is that Bovard recycles some of the same material. There are even entire paragraphs that look like they were cut and pasted from "Freedom". But since some of the issues he looks at were the same, I suppose we cannot expect him to reword everything he said. This book also differs from Freedom In Chains thematically. Whereas "Freedom" examined the concepts of freedom and liberty and the conflict between liberty and statism in a philosophical framework, his current work looks at how the Clinton Administration's policies have curtailed or threatened to curtail our liberties in a number of policy areas.

While some of Bovard's detractors may dismiss "feeling your pain" as just another Clinton bashing book, Bovard acknowledges that the Republicans would not have had a much better track record on many of these issues if they controlled the White House. This book is a must for anyone who wants ammunition to argue with a die hard Clinton partisan.

76 of 83 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars See the Forest Through the Trees, September 25, 2000

By	Dan Anderson (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This is an important "anthology" of the abuses of the Clinton-Gore administration. To regular Bovard readers, it does cover some of the material that his other works have detailed but is a disturbing litany of statist, unconstitutional, and power hungry moves by this administration. What this summary does is put in greater perspective the actions of the Clinton-Gore administration that range from seemingly unrelated domestic policy such as HUD and farm loans programs to foreign policy such as the WTO and the Serbian war.

The common thread is a executive branch gobbling ever increasingly amount of control over normal people's lives while dishing out intellectually contorted reasoning appealing to people's emotions and fears. Intentions are always more important than results, activity more desired than progress, the end always justifies the means, and the truth is simply a tool to be used, warped, or discarded to advance one's aims. When we are constantly told that "it's all old news" or "just about sex", the casual political observer can't help but sit back and wonder about the lies we don't know about. This is what the book is all about.

I recommend you read the one star review from the person from California ("Hatred, not analysis"). This is an ironic message that illustrates all that the Clinton administration wants you to swallow. The reviewer reminds you that any dissenting opinion is simply "right wing hatred". He/she -- knows -- that the author has his facts wrong but won't tell you how they know this nor site any examples of these errors ("just trust me..."). What the Clinton-Gore apologists want us to believe is that any administration discretion is just a rare, isolated brush fire that really isn't a big issue, has been dealt with and there's nothing to worry about except when one steps back and examines the forest they find that the entire landscape is in flames.

31 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Real Case For Impeachment Is Made Here, October 31, 2000

By	BluesDuke "A sacred cow is worth but one thin... (Huntington Beach, California) - See all my reviews

If even half of this remarkable, lucid book is true - and, knowing the author of "Lost Rights" and "Freedom in Chains," there is little question that "Feeling Your Pain" is a searingly factual indictment, and a frightening exposure of the havoc wreaked upon the Constitution and its protected citizenry by the Clinton Administration - Bill Clinton was impeachable for reasons having not a bloody thing to do with sexual harassment suits, stained blue dresses, or a little perjury, suborning perjury, or obstructing justice to hide a little extramarital nooky in the Oval Office.

And it is just as damning an indictment, if read very carefully, of a Republican Party which held control of Congress for most of the Clinton years and saw fit to do little more than turn around, bend over, and bleat, "Thank you, sir, and may I have another?" at nearly every turn of the Clinton screw, making them accessories to a thorough flouting of the Constitution and trampling of the rights and even lives of individual Americans and what remain of their rights and sovereignty. (I hardly need to say that it indicts a Democratic Party which aided and abetted the turns of Clinton's ... at every last turn, effectively letting him make a monkey out of a party which had already long gone ape in the fever swamps of Statism.) This book should be required reading for anyone who would dare to enter the voting booth on November 7.