Do-Gooders: How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim to Help-And the Rest of Us

by Mona Charen

Book Overview

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,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1595230033
• ISBN13: 9781595230034
• Release Date: December 2004
• Publisher: Sentinel
• Length: 269 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.4" x 9.4"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Useless do-gooders

In a fitting follow on to "Useful idiots," Charen gives us more examples of liberal `wisdom,' poor projections, data-free assertions, perverse psychology, and other well-intentioned (they are `do-gooders' after all) but ill-conceived and ill-advised policies and practices from the left side. In 236 concise pages, with 21 pages of footnotes and a two-page partial bibliography, she makes her case. Sometimes the bad advice from the left is so bountiful that she appears to engage in overkill. Let's just say that there is plenty of evidence. Six chapters cover crime (the impact of Giuliani's zero tolerance policies on the murder rate in NYC saved thousands of lives; psychiatric hospitals have reduced their patent count by hundreds of thousands since the 1950s and guess where they end up), racism (heavy-handed, dishonest Democratic party pandering to African-Americans means that Dems get 85% of the African-American vote but not since LBJ the majority of the national vote, and LBJ's civil rights legislation passed because of Republicans and despite Democratic opposition), welfare (Charen quotes single one mother of six children from six different fathers who tells NYC mayor John Lindsay that it is her job to bear children and his job "to take care of them."), families (traditional two-parent families are the best form of poverty prevention ever invented), homelessness (Charles Osgood projects 19 million homeless by the year 2000, using the conventional wisdom of Mitch Snyder's admitted made-up figure of 3 million homeless in the eighties; see psychiatric population, above), and education (public schools spend little of their budgets on students, books or even teachers who teach, and when they do teach the subjects increasingly have little to do with a useful education). Depressing and disturbing but detailed and devastating. Note: On p. 194 she identifies Blanche Lincoln as (D-AK). I think AK means Alaska, and Lincoln is from Arkansas (AR).

A body check to the liberal solar plexus

Ahhh, there's nothing better than seeing a new book from the always analytical Mona Charen. My local newspaper, the Omaha World Herald, once carried her editorials on a regular basis. They also reprinted at one time the conservative opinions of Thomas Sowell and Michelle Malkin. Alas, no more. Now I get an eyeful of Bill O'Reilly and George Will balanced by a bunch of leftist hacks I'd just as soon ignore. Although her biting wit has been missing from my paper for some time, I fondly remember spending many a day perusing Charen's observations about the latest left-wing lunacy. Reading her articles and her two books, I soon came to the conclusion that dear Mona is sort of an old guard conservative, meaning Ronald Reagan era conservatism. It's not surprising, really. Charen once worked as a speechwriter for Nancy Reagan as well as served time in the White House's Public Affairs Office. She also helped spread the word about the White House's policies in Central America. For a comprehensive examination of 1980s conservative/liberal battles as seen through the eyes of Charen, read her book "Useful Idiots." If you want a book that addresses specific liberal social policies that have led to domestic disaster, read this book. "Do-Gooders: How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim to Help" feels like an echo of conservative treatments released in the 1980s. There is nothing original here in terms of subject matter--Charen writes about the destructive influence of left-wing thought and action concerning homelessness, schools, crime, racial sensitivity, and the welfare state. Nearly every author in the conservative camp covers most of these issues at some point, but Charen's book is slightly better than most thanks to her reliance on massive statistical evidence to back up her horrific assertions. And they are horrific in the sense that decent Americans have let this nonsense go on for far too long, now going on forty years too long. Ever since the counterculture blighted the American landscape, we've had nothing but problems that seem to go on and on without end. Problems including but not limited to sky-high divorce rates, massive explosions in the numbers of both violent and nonviolent crimes, a tidal wave of costly entitlement programs that bring dependency to thousands upon thousands more citizens every year, an increase in drug use, and an embarrassing number of single mothers. Charen begins her book by casting us back into time, back to the days of the mid to late 1960s when the Supreme Court expanded the rights of criminals through the Miranda and Mapp cases. Sure, these rulings certainly helped some innocent people charged with a crime escape wrongful convictions, but they led to far more thugs getting off on technicalities. These rulings also opened the door to a leniency towards criminals that continues to shock the public. Charen shows us how Judge "Turn 'Em Loose Bruce" Wright operates in the courtroom, and how Justice Harold Baer let a gang of nar

Six powerful and well written essays on important topics

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 mor

5 stars from a recovering liberal

A conservative friend loaned me this book and I agreed to read it. Page after page, I was left speechless. For a while I tried to sputter out a rebuttal but I finally had to stop trying. It was great to finally admit that all this "do-gooding" is bad for everyone. I can finally stop working to deny poor children a better education through voucher programs. All this time I was smug and I thought I knew what was best for other people. This author explains in her confident way what is really best for other people and how I was wrong. She picks great examples of famous liberals saying stupid things and then tears those quotes apart. Too bad for us liberals that those were our best and only arguments. That was all we had. Dang.

Left-Wingers will be left speechless

Mona Charen, who has shown a strong ability to disarm liberals on a regular basis through her syndicated newspaper articles, has written a brilliant book that addresses issues such as, education, Affirmative Action, and Welfare. There's nothing liberals can say to counter the points Mona makes. While Mona's style is less confrontional like that of Anne Coulter, she is nonetheless witty, bright, and on target. I highly recommend this book as important reading for anyone who wants to analyze the failures of liberalism and set the record straight.