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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rackhir" data-source="post: 1606620" data-attributes="member: 149">Sorry to take so long to get back to you. It took a while to locate a copy of the book and then track the quote down.You don't consider getting the Palestinians and Israelies to live together in peace to be miracle enough? I haven't read Executive Orders, or wait is that the one with the "Bombing the One Bad Guy Leader and Ending the War" fantasy? After all it was soooo easy when we tried to do that to Sadam or Milosovich. You know if it wasn't for books left behind at vacation houses, I wouldn't have read anything past "The Sum of All Fears". I guess it's one of those things where you read something horrible, swear you'll never read anything like it/by that author and then several years later in a fit of optimisim and forgotten pain you read something again. I was shocked I must admit to realize how many of his books I'd read over the years.I'll grant it's probably not directly stated in those terms, but given that Clancy is a very right wing conservative, I would be surprised that Jack would follow any other sort of economic policy. Also, Jack can do no wrong and the only time I recall any problems with the US economy was when "Bad People" were making things go wrong. I definitely saw references to tax cuts helping the economy, a pecular fetish of the right wing (especially when running a war and with massive deficits being run up). But that was kind of a cheap shot I'll admit.Okay, I was stretching things a liiiitttleee bit here, but it did seem (to me) to be a side effect of Jack's overwhelming aura of purity and goodness. You know how the cardboard cutout bad guys always get foiled and crushed, while only good things happen to the good guys?This is true, but he is also supposed to be a human being. Plaster saints might be that pure and without fault, but people are not. Especially for someone in office, since politics is driven by compromise and campaign donations. I realize that Jack is of course independently wealthy since he's never wrong and this makes raking it in on the stock market trivial. But even real life wealthy candidates still take campaign contributions. Speaking of wealth, another bit that really cracked me up in "The Bear and The Dragon" was when Clancy was describing how all of his cabinet heads were free of corruption since they were all independently wealthy and (of course) had earned it all through the sweat of their brows. Of course wealthy people would never get that way through doing anything less than the upright moral thing, nor abuse their power to get more money. Just like the heads of Enron, Global Crossing, Bill Gates and many other already wealthy heads of large corporations didn't. Well, I can understand missing it. It is about a half page in an 1100 page monstrosity. In the standard sized paperback edition it's on page 209, about 2/3rds of the way down the page. I did misremember it slightly, Jack was thinking to himself not chewing out somebody. So here's the quote in full."After all, congress made the law. Congress made government policy, and those things couldn't be wrong could they? Yet another proof that the drafters of the constitution had made one simple but far-reaching error. They'd assumed that the people selected by The People to manage the nation would be as honest and honorable as they'd been. One could almost hear the "Ooops!" emanating from all those old graves. The people who'd drafted the consistution had sat in a room dominated by George Washington Himself, and whatever honor they'd lacked he'd probably provided from his own abundant supply." While it's difficult to knock George, that paragraph displays a total ignorance of the history of our government and how it came to be. Or possibly it is another manifestation of Clancy's severely biased view of politics. Most likely both.Now I will grant that Clancy can write a rollicking good action tale, when he gets around to it, but his characters are almost never more than carboard cutouts. The good guys are always pure good, ultra competent at anything they need to do and (essentially) never make any mistakes, The bad guys are without any redeeming qualities and usually blind to any faults or mistakes they might be making. Also anyone who isn't in Jack's court, is almost invariably liberal, wrong, shortsighted, cowardly, pigheaded, malicious, selfish and hoplessly naive. There is little I find to be more obnoxious that when a writer is using their story to club you over the head with their point of view, especially when it's an extremely simplistic, biased and unrealistic view.</blockquote>

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