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Do-Gooders: How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim to Help (and the Rest of Us) (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: family preservation, New York, United States, African Americans (more...)
3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (52 customer reviews)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

From its provocative title, to its headshots of liberals that conservatives love to hate (Hillary Clinton, Michael Moore, Rosie O'Donnell), Charen signals right away that she will make no attempt to bridge a widening divide. She does make an attempt to add some empirical weight to the usual vitriol of liberal bashing, however. This polemic includes over 20 pages of footnotes to back up its various claims and offers a partial bibliography for those wanting to read more written by those who share Charen's political leanings. But even with the citations, Charen's argument (over six chapters) is simple in every sense: everything that has gone bad in American society is the fault of liberal policies and the countercultural movements of the 1960s, and everything that is getting better is the consequence of the leadership of a few (visionary) politicians on the right. Charen makes frequent use of quotes from a range of people in the "do-gooder" camp (although she seems oddly fixated on Moore, Jesse Jackson and the editorial page of the New York Times), but this is largely a cherry-picking exercise rather than a more thoughtful attempt to evaluate the core assumptions and values that guide liberal policy makers. (Jan.)
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Product Description

Mona Charen has a loyal following from her syndicated newspaper column (which runs in more than two hundred newspapers) and her many television and radio appearances. Her first book, Useful Idiots, was an eight-week New York Times bestseller. Now she’s back, switching her focus from foreign policy to domestic issues.

Unlike some conservatives who throw verbal hand grenades, Charen never gets shrill or mean. Instead, she focuses on the facts to reveal exactly why liberals are wrong—and how their proposals hurt the very people they claim to be fighting for, as well as the country as a whole.

Do-Gooders is a guide to the smug know-it-alls in politics, the news media, and Hollywood who think they know what’s best for the poor and other needy Americans. From Marian Wright Edelman to John Kerry, Hillary Rodham Clinton to Rob Reiner, this book will skewer the liberals by name. It covers topics such as:
• Education: Do-gooders send their own kids to private schools while working to deny poor children a better education through voucher programs.
• Affirmative Action: Do-gooders defend racial preferences at all costs while ignoring the enormous problems they create for African Americans at all levels of achievement.
• Welfare: Do-gooders thought welfare reform in the 1990s would hurt the poor, and they still refuse to admit how much it actually helped.

By collecting and exposing the most outrageous quotes and actions of the do- gooders, this book will become a must-read for conservatives across the country as they gear up for the next round of policy battles.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 288 pages
  • Publisher: Sentinel HC (December 29, 2004)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1595230033
  • ISBN-13: 978-1595230034
  • Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (52 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #365,588 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Mona Charen
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Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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family preservation
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New York, United States, African Americans, Supreme Court, New Jersey, Jesse Jackson, Justice Department, President Clinton, Los Angeles, Civil Rights Commission, Judge Pickering, White House, American Civil Liberties Union, Bill Clinton, Court of Appeals, District of Columbia, Lyndon Johnson, World War, Anita Hill, Jim Crow, Great Depression, Head Start, Hillary Clinton, James Byrd, Murphy Brown
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52 Reviews
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119 of 143 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Six powerful and well written essays on important topics, February 28, 2005
While the bestseller lists usually contain one or more conservative books providing a survey of what is wrong with liberal thought or how liberals are undermining America, this book deserves to be set apart and taken much more seriously. Rather than a glib survey of the popular scene with sharp barbs tossed at the usual suspects, Mona Charen provides us with six powerful essays. She is a former White House speechwriter, and her gift for fashioning vibrant and passionate prose in the service of a well constructed argument shows in every page of this book.

These essays take on liberal articles of faith and leftist bureaucratic groupthink. Mrs. Charen demonstrates how the culture of non-judgment and soft punishment is connected to the great increase in crime for the past several decades. She shows how blind the establishment has been to why Giuliani's policies in governing New York actually had an impact.

She also illuminates how the race relations industry stifles progress and demagogues the issue of race in our country. Her discussion of the predictable (and predicted) debilitating influence the creation of "entitlements" has had on our country. To the point that one Supreme Court justice actually compared the entitlement of welfare to a medical license or a license to practice law. It is as if all jobs were sinecures and it was up to the government to allocate them according to their whim. You will just shake your head when see the foolishness of these policies laid out in this essay.

Of course, more than one person predicted that these policies along with other changes in our culture would lead to fewer strong families and the cost this would have on children. Many bought into the notion that if the adults were happier divorced then the children would be happier. Those that said this was lunacy were shouted down. Nowadays, it is clear that government policies have made a powerful contribution to weakening families and harming children. Again, read what Mrs. Charen says and you will learn how this has been a decades long fiasco.

The author also does a fabulous job in demonstrating how the homelessness crisis was a pure creation of the left on the one hand emptying the mental hospitals directly onto the streets and then misrepresenting both the mix of who was actually homeless and how many of them there were. Under Reagan and the first Bush there were gillions of them. Under Clinton, none. Under Bush II we are back to at least a kajillion. Ho, ho, ho.

No one is taking lightly those truly in need and we all should help out local programs at our churches and homeless shelters and the Salvation Army to get food and shelter to all in need. The point here is the naked politics of the reporting on this issue.

The last essay is on the tragic destruction of our public schools over the past several decades. The growth of the education bureaucracy has taken needed resources away from the classroom. The establishment cries for more money even when we spend hundreds of billions of dollars and keep increasing the amounts tossed into that sink hole. Yet what our students actually know shrinks - but they feel really proud of themselves and are experts on popular culture.

If you are going to get just one book on important current issues I would recommend that you give this book serious consideration. Strongly Recommended.
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26 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Emancipation doesn't mean being led astray, October 17, 2005
Original socialists (sic) wanted to emancipate the honest workman. Undereducated, he was not well equipped to improve this position or negotioate.

At least in Europe, there was some success... between 1880 and 1920! They got -somewhat- liberated.

Ever since, instead of freeing people, the socialist wanted to develop a nanny state, where Mother Knows Best(tm). And as the State grew, freedom deminished.

It's pretty amazing so many people still fall for the trap of the Do-gooders, who lead people to believe they can get all kinds of freebies on OTHER man's wallet.

Yet the only thing they achieve, is distributing money OUT of the wallet of average people, making them more dependent, and less able to lead their own lives, and make ends meet.

Now everybody turns to the state for answers. Most money is however wasted to endless bureaycracy, not end-goals.

Do-gooders very eloquently shows how this develops, the attitudes, reactions of people. Real world examples. I just hope many people read this. Once you do, not only do people immediately recognise them to be true, they might see the emerging trend.

I don't remember who said this: "Knowledge is favourable to liberty. Educate the people and they will apply the remedy."

This is another startingpoint.. A good one, too.
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33 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Do-Gooders = Do-Badders, November 7, 2005
By Martin Asiner (jersey city, nj United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
Up until the Vietnam War. Democrats and Republicans quarreled incessantly over a wide range of issues, but one issue that they always agreed on was national security. That feeling of solidarity began to corrode as pro-Marxist thought began to infest America's colleges and mass media. Vietnam drew the battle lines. Iraq etched this line indelibly in the minds of the Left. Mona Charon sees this demarcation as an unbridgeable gulf that has led to a dissolution of much of the promise that used to be called, in pre-politically correct days, as the American Dream of true hope and sustained progress. In USEFUL IDIOTS, Charon takes the Left to task as she notes how liberals have ruined America in foreign affairs and now in DO-GOODERS, she does much the same as she focuses on how liberals have exacerbated a wide spectrum of domestic calamities ranging from urban crime to welfare abuse to homelessness and finally to the collapse of our educational system.

Charon does not intend DO-GOODERS to be an even handed book. She intends it as a polemic against a mindset that places the rights and welfare of the unworthy individual against those of society at large. Charon notes how the Left has taken the traditional credo of America--the rights of the individual must be respected by the collective mass--and have transformed it into the rights of the individual must always supercede the rights of the many. She notes that the America of 2005 is one that would hardly be recognizable to the traditional Democrats of JFK, Hubert Humphrey, and Scoop Jackson. The police are hamstrung in their efforts to control crime. Welfare is seen as a socialist right rather than as what had once been viewed as a somewhat repugnant alternative to poverty by an earlier generation. Modern educational pedagogy stresses esteem and multiculturalism over what used to be called the ABC's. Charon notes that liberals are united in their efforts to remake America into what passes for culture in France and Germany. She wisely points out that both of those countries suffer from social ills that this country has avoided. The recent riots in France serve as a sobering harbinger as to what might lie ahead for the United States should the radical Left tilt of the Democratic Party continue unabated. DO-GOODERS is a timely book that proves once again that those who think that they know what is best for the rest of us do not even know what is best for themselves.
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5.0 out of 5 stars Well-earned great reviews
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