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Trumped Up: How Criminalization of Political Differences Endangers Democracy Paperback – August 15, 2017
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As seen on Fox & Friends, from the author of The Case Against Impeaching Trump!
"There are great legal minds; there are those who can also communicate well on television; then there is Dershowitz. The professor is uniquely capable of arguing a position, while putting a premium on legal and ethical legitimacy, not its popularity. Bravo, Dershowitz!" – Chris Cuomo, anchor and reporter, CNN
"This collection shows Alan Dershowitz at his best—passionate, fearless, and occasionally very wrong." – Jeffrey Toobin, bestselling author of The Nine, Too Close to Call, A Vast Conspiracy, and The Run of His Life.
"Alan Dershowitz doesn’t twist the constitution to fit an agenda. He tells you what it REALLY means. That’s why he has always been my go-to guy on the law and the Constitution." – Greta Van Susteren, former anchor at CNN, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC
"This book will reinforce Alan Dershowitz’s well-earned reputation as a brilliant legal analyst who, although often swimming against the established current, is usually right. Dershowitz substitutes his trenchant legal analysis for the wishful thinking and self-aggrandizing moral superiority that is presented by many in the academy and media, as well as Trump’s political opponents. Dershowitz’s arguments should cause all rational citizens to take a deep breath and recognize, as Dershowitz demonstrates, that Trump may be many things, but, under current law and the known evidence, the President is not a criminal. His analysis seems flawless to me." – Harvey A. Silverglate, Criminal and civil liberties lawyer, author of Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent
In our current age of hyper-partisan politics, nearly everyone takes sides. This is especially true with regard to the Trump presidency. It has become difficult to have a reasonable discussion about the most controversial president in our recent history. For Trump zealots, their president has not only committed no crimes, he has done nothing wrong. For anti-Trump zealots, nothing Trump has done—even in foreign policy—is good. Everything he has done is wrong, and since it is wrong, it must necessarily be criminal. This deeply undemocratic fallacy—that political sins must be investigated and prosecuted as criminal—is an exceedingly dangerous trend.
Hardening positions on both sides has been manifested by increasing demands to criminalize political differences. Both sides scream “lock ‘em up” instead of making substantive criticisms of opposing views.
The real fear, as Alan Dershowitz argues, in this compelling collection, is that we have weakened our national commitment to civil liberties as the Left becomes ever more intolerant and the Right slips into authoritarian rhetoric. The vibrant center is weakening, with traditional liberalism and conservatism becoming further apart, not just in approach, but in their respect for Constitutional norms that have served us well for more than two centuries.
While Donald Trump is not the only cause of this profound division, his election drew it to the surface and made it the dominant paradigm of political debate. Unless we as a nation begin to focus again on what unites us rather than on what divides us, America might not survive the next decade.
Published by Bombardier Book, an imprint of Post Hill Press.
- Length
196
Pages
- Language
EN
English
- Publication date
2017
August 15
- Dimensions
6.0 x 0.5 x 9.0
inches
- ISBN-101974617890
- ISBN-13978-1974617890
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Product details
- Publisher : CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (August 15, 2017)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 196 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1974617890
- ISBN-13 : 978-1974617890
- Item Weight : 10.4 ounces
- Dimensions : 6 x 0.5 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #540,376 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,106 in Political Commentary & Opinion
- Customer Reviews:
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About the author

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ is a Brooklyn native who has been called 'the nation's most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer' and one of its 'most distinguished defenders of individual rights,' 'the best-known criminal lawyer in the world,' 'the top lawyer of last resort,' and 'America's most public Jewish defender.' He is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Dershowitz, a graduate of Brooklyn College and Yale Law School, joined the Harvard Law School faculty at age 25 after clerking for Judge David Bazelon and Justice Arthur Goldberg. While he is known for defending clients such as Anatoly Sharansky, Claus von B'low, O.J. Simpson, Michael Milken and Mike Tyson, he continues to represent numerous indigent defendants and takes half of his cases pro bono. Dershowitz is the author of 20 works of fiction and non-fiction, including 6 bestsellers. His writing has been praised by Truman Capote, Saul Bellow, David Mamet, William Styron, Aharon Appelfeld, A.B. Yehoshua and Elie Wiesel. More than a million of his books have been sold worldwide, in numerous languages, and more than a million people have heard him lecture around the world. His most recent nonfiction titles are The Case For Peace: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Can be Resolved (August 2005, Wiley); Rights From Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights (November 2004, Basic Books), The Case for Israel (September 2003, Wiley), America Declares Independence, Why Terrorism Works, Shouting Fire, Letters to a Young Lawyer, Supreme Injustice, and The Genesis of Justice. His novels include The Advocate's Devil and Just Revenge. Dershowitz is also the author of The Vanishing American Jew, The Abuse Excuse, Reasonable Doubts, Chutzpah (a #1 bestseller), Reversal of Fortune (which was made into an Academy Award-winning film), Sexual McCarthyism and The Best Defense.
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As you would expect from a professor of law at Harvard, the writing is superb. It is concise and clear and you don’t need a Harvard degree to understand it. Dershowitz deftly avoids the jargon of both academia and political extremism. Perhaps most refreshingly, he studiously avoids the weasel words and phrases (e.g., “experts say,” “mainstream opinion,” etc.) that have destructively diluted the authenticity of political dialogue and debate today.
In discussing “corrupt motive”, for example, Dershowitz concludes, “Anglo-American law is based on precedent. What happens today can be used tomorrow. So beware of creating precedents that lie around like loaded weapons in the hands of overzealous or politically motivated prosecutors.” Simple, concise, and clear.
By definition words are imprecise. Unlike oxygen and sunshine, they are a human convention. A skillful writer or orator can use the wiggle room that always exist in their meaning to promote a position that is strongly supported, but not entirely conclusive. We can’t expect anyone of the professor’s lingual skills not to utilize those skills any more than we can expect a MLB outfielder to intentionally drop a fly ball now and again to prove he is human. But while Dershowitz races up to the warning track in a few cases he always pulls up. It would be unfair, I think, to characterize anything in this book as distorted or misleading.
My only reservation about the book is that it doesn’t always stay within the lines of its title. While he covers the criminalization of political differences in depth, he does get sidetracked from time to time in his defense of Israel and, for example, the role of Keith Ellison on the Democratic National Committee, and his past disagreements with people like John Flannery and Noam Chomsky. His positions are well-reasoned and important expansions of the public record. I only worry that they will draw attention away from the primary theme of the book.
That is to be expected from a man of principle, however. The man has the fortitude it takes for constancy. And, in the end, I applaud the professor for both his passion and his courage.
At 193 pages it is a quick read. I highly recommend it.
Judith Miller of the New York Times spent 3 months in jail for nothing.
Libby was convicted because he worked for VP Dick Cheney and President George Bush gave the 2003 State of the Union with the 16 words, “the greatest danger facing America and the world is outlaw regimes that seek and possess nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.”
Libby should not have been on trial because no one was charged with leaking the name of a classified CIA covert agent. The Special Counsel was set up to find out who leaked her name but no one was found.
Any President, anyone with any human decency should give a full pardon to Libby.
There was no Russian collusion:
Collusions are supposed to be secret. During Wold War II, the Germans did not know their secret Enigma code were decoded and the Japanese did not know their secret military codes were broken by the Allies. Spies are discreet, they do not leave evidence behind to get caught.
The compelling evidence that gave away there was no Russian collusion was that the DNC emails appeared on WikiLeaks on July 22, 2016. Vladimir Putin and his Russian spies are not that stupid to leave a trail on WikiLeaks.
Unfortunately, Dershowitz spends much of the book attacking Democrats who dare to advance an agenda more progressive than his “liberal center.” His discussion of why Trump won the election, (and Hillary Clinton lost) was shallow to put it mildly. He complains that the vibrant center was being weakened by a shift to the extremes. He neglects to mention that that Hillary Clinton’s pandering to the ultra rich and the Clinton’s amassing of tens of millions of dollars through exorbitant speaking fees was obvious to anyone who was paying attention to the election. Is Alan Dershowitz unaware that under the last 4 presidents, 2 democrats and 2 republicans, who could be characterized as largely centrist, wealth has become more and more concentrated in the hands of the top 1 and top 10% while many in the lower 90 % are struggling? His sarcastic attack on Sanders supporters, who he refers to as “Sanderistas,” is indicative of his failure to understand how the his wing of the Democratic Party has failed many Americans who see these politicians repeatedly representing the interests of the wealth and the special interests. For example, Sanders supported the resumption of Glass Steagall, a policy which is the anathema to Wall Street. Much of the book is dedicated to discussing his views on Israel and attacking those who disagree with Benjamin Netanyahu. His attacks on other Democrats are largely focused on their alleged views on Israel, while he ignores the many substantive issues that they are raising.
Dershowitz should have stuck to advancing reasoned argument about protecting civil liberties. Dershowitz’s distractions make his book another unfortunate example of how the “liberal center” Democrats seem to have no clue about the issues that are affecting the lower 90%, but are intent in reducing politics to their special interests and hot button issues.







