BuzzFlash Reviews

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Jack Cafferty is sort of a national political version of the late Mike Royko. He's a curmudgeon who doesn't like anybody very much. How can you not love a guy who thinks that "We need great leadership now. ... Bush is the worst president I can remember."

You may not agree with everything Cafferty says, but he is an all too rare throwback in the mainstream media of a cynical reporter who cuts through the B.S. and gets right down to calling it as he sees it.

He's one of the few people left in the corporate press who denounces phonies and doesn't suffer fools gladly.

If someone told him to pull his punches or be fired, he'd probably kick them in the nuts.

No, they don't allow many like Cafferty anymore.

But BuzzFlash readers should be aware that he'll just as gladly and gruffly takes on Democratic fools and hypocrites. He's an equal opportunity gadfly; it just so happens that there are so many, many more corrupt Republicans to take on, beginning with the occupants of the White House, that he's most regularly found making his jaded "take no prisoners" commentaries on the fools in the White House.

Cafferty's the last of an age. We don't know if he smokes cigars or drinks, but you can imagine him with a stogie, a shot of bourbon, and a full house as he prepares to sweep the winnings from an all night poker game.

We're sure he gets paid well from CNN, but that's not his thing.

He's one of the cantankerous, loveable dinosaurs that still thinks journalism is about trying to approximate the truth.

That's what makes him such a refreshing presence on a glitzy, attention deficit disorder network like CNN.

From the publisher:

"Very little of my backstory qualifies as Hallmark Card material, but it may help you to make sense of the way I see and interpret what's going on around me."
-Jack Cafferty

For the millions who watch the "Cafferty File" on CNN's The Situation Room, Jack Cafferty stands for common sense-the much-needed voice of reason who skewers right-wing nut jobs and liberal eggheads alike. For years, he's voiced the views, hopes, and fears of the average American in inimitable style. Now, in It's Getting Ugly Out There, he brings that level-headed wisdom to bear on the most critical issues facing us today-and explains why Americans must take our country back from those who are harming it.

"It's been a target-rich seven years for someone like me who enjoys pushing people's buttons and sticking pins in things that need pricking, from rich and fatuous celebrities offering foreign policy analysis to the latest lying Beltway blowhard impaling himself on his sword of pomposity. . . . Anyone familiar with my daily 'Cafferty File' segments on CNN's The Situation Room knows I'm not exactly what you'd call the mainstream media's poster boy for feel-good news and commentary. In your face is more like it."

"I'm no shrink, but I have the sense Bush has carried an angry chip on his shoulder much of his pampered life, seething just beneath the good-old-boy surface."

"The bottom line is that our government no longer works for us. The government works for the lobbyists who have had a big hand in influencing (if not helping to draft) legislation favoring not the average American citizen but instead big business: health insurance, pharmaceutical and oil companies, and defense contractors, among others. These are the guys who can make the kinds of political contributions that are needed to finance today's multi-million-dollar political campaigns."

"We want our troops home, but we also want a new army of elected officials to march into Washington and take a fresh, uncorrupted look at the needs of the vast majority of Americans. If these two parties, however 2008 breaks, can't fix what's broken, this way of life as we've known it may vanish into some deep, dark crevasse."

From Publishers Weekly:

His deep, fatherly voice may evoke the comfort of an old-fashioned, Conkrite-era news broadcast, but newsman Cafferty has made a career of saying whatever he damn well pleases: "I get paid to ask questions I don't know the answers to and to complain about the things that bother me." Reading the television news correspondent's first book feels much like watching his segments on CNN's The Situation Room, in which he follows a similarly straightforward formula: denounce bad leadership, media shortcomings and government missteps with a satirical tone just above withering. From Katrina to Iraq, from immigration to terrorism, from Bush-baiting to big business, Cafferty admits to "saying some pretty outrageous stuff" in order to get his audience riled up. Aside from skewering congress, shaming rich white guys, and repudiating Anna Nicole (the "peroxide blonde never-was"), Cafferty sheds some light on his own life, sharing personal episodes about disrespecting his boot camp drill sergeants and letting his terrier defecate in the lobby of the Des Moines television station for which he was working.

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