Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

As a Brit who regularly votes Tory (that's the British version of the Republican party for those of you who aren't aware of the fact - Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher and the like) I am nevertheless astonished at the extent to which American politics seems to have become personalised and... well... shrill, recently. We have a saying in Britain that what happens in America will happen in Britain two years down the road - well here's hoping we pass on this sort of thing! This is a TERRIBLE book. It's been a personal object lesson in why you shouldn't allow morbid curiosity to get you to fork out good money. The literary/political equivalent of slowing down on the road to stare at the results of a car crash. Mean spirited, partisan nonsense. And most (not all) of it IS nonsense. Since this book I've seen Ann Coulter on a political panel show (where she talked over and shouted down the host and all the other panelists, including the historian Niall Ferguson who was meant to be there to back up her side of the argument) and tracked down some of her articles and... oh dear. Seriously folks, if you want to seem like a well-informed, non-clinically insane conservative, go and read Edmund Burke. Or Thomas Hobbes. Or even P. J. O'Rourke or Mark Steyn. Or anything but this. This is shockingly bad, mean spirited nonsense that preaches to the converted and tells a certain sort of person what they want to hear and not much else. Before people start claiming I'm some sort of left wing plant (though I suppose given that I don't subscribe to the idea that there's some sort of [plan] sweeping the western world I will be considered inherently suspect) I should point out that this sort of thing is not a sin that is exclusive to the right. The left has more than it's share of cranks too. But don't be fooled into thinking that this book is anything other than a right wing version of the sort of [weak information] by the likes of Al Sharpton and Noam Chomsky because it isn't. Also, for the record while we're on the subject, Bill Clinton - neither the [bad guy] nor the great white liberal hope. Just a profoundly forgettable, superficially attractive (to some - I never understood personally) mediocrity. There, I've said it. Startling revelation isn't it?