In the green room, my mind went back thirty years to a different basketball venue we shared—the U.S. House Members’ Gym—and pick-up games in which Gore was a deadeye from the outside.

His political touch was never as deft. His consultant-inspired sighs and patronizing name-dropping in the 2000 debates helped George Bush more than George Bush helped himself, an odd feat.

The man I met at the Rose Garden, however, has blown off consultants, taken precise aim at causes larger than himself and seems liberated because of it. When they write the history of climate change, Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth may prove as seminal as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was to abolition.

Now comes The Assault On Reason, which warns against a threat not to the natural environment but to the American political environment and democracy itself.

The book advances four major arguments. First, the invention of moveable type in the 15th Century democratized civic knowledge previously monopolized by elites—and ultimately spawned the Enlightenment and an attendant belief in the power of reason, the bedrock of American democracy.

Gore contends that modern media conglomerates are reversing the process, his second point. By blurring news and entertainment—especially on television “news” where most Americans get their information—they sate the public with journalistic air balls such as Britney Spear’s shaved head and Anna Nicole Smith’s baby, disproportionately reserving too much consequential information to political elites.

With the public thus distracted from a reasoned debate about our national life, the book asserts, the Bush Administration capitalized on 9/11 and preyed on the fear of terrorism—abandoning the rule of reason for hubris and an appetite for raw power. “In almost every policy area,” Gore writes, “the administration’s consistent goal has been to eliminate any constraints—whether by law, regulations, alliance, or treaty—on their exercise of power.”
This is Gore’s third theme, that Bush and Cheney have “taken us further down the road toward an intrusive ‘Big Brother’-style of government—toward the dangers prophesized by George Orwell in his book 1984—than anyone ever thought would be possible.”

He chides both men for justifying the Iraq invasion by repeatedly linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11—a groundless assertion that 50 percent of the public still believes.

“[That] lie was also the key to justifying a constitutional power grab by the president,” he writes, citing warrantless wiretaps of phones and computers, unannounced entry into private homes even when owners are absent, the “un-American” jailing of citizens deemed to be “enemy combatants” without charges or access to lawyers, the use of torture, and the abuse of presidential “signing statements” attached to laws passed by Congress, in which the president asserts the right to ignore their requirements when he feels so inclined.

Duplicity and misfeasance of such magnitude would seem impeachable but Gore does not go there in the book and specifically rejected the idea in a recent interview on PBS’s News Hour. Yet he writes, “If [Bush and Cheney] actually believed [in a pre-war Saddam-al Qaeda linkage] in spite of all the evidence to the contrary…that would by itself, in the light of the available evidence, make them genuinely unfit to lead our nation.”

He quotes James Madison: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many…may be justly pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” In that spirit, Gore is convinced Founders “would feel that we … are facing a clear and present danger with the potential to threaten the future of the American experiment.”

But if such a threat and collapse of reason cannot be stopped by impeachment or even, as Gore suggests, by an election, what is his solution?

The Internet.

In this final point, he claims the World Wide Web’s easy access allows almost anyone to set up a site and become a modern day version of the pamphleteers, newspaper founders, and broadside authors who flourished during the birth of the republic. Gore believes when the Internet reaches its potential it may well eclipse the mainstream media and their “one-way” communication of “infotainment” with a spirited, interactive exercise of grassroots reason and analysis.

Gore’s prescription suffers in contrast to his erudite diagnosis of the problem. He ignores, for instance, the habit of serious blog readers to frequent sites that support their biases and ignore sites that don’t, behavior that falls short of thesis, antithesis and synthesis—in short, the kind of analysis that guards against any assault on reason.

But if only for its urgent, authoritative description of how presidential power has been aggrandized, this book is important reading.
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Billed as an average citizen’s guide to “decoding corrupt politicians’ lies, myths and half-truths,” Sirota is nothing if not ecumenical. The national commentator tees off on Democratic and Republican predators with equal fury as he describes the U.S. political system as being rigged against Middle America.

Sirota is a progressive populist — not to be confused with a conventional liberal who eschews class-based politics — and his book is a manual for waging a class-based political counterattack against the conservative populist movement that produced Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Bill Bennett and George W. Bush, along with a massive transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top.

Sirota uses extensive research to assert that concentrated wealth, corporate avarice and complicit federal politicians have skewered average American wage earners. This, Sirota asserts, helps explain how wages, in real terms, have hit the lowest level in 50 years while corporate profits reached their highest level in 50 years, and how corporations and the very wealthy have used their ill-gotten wealth to buy the political system to squeeze the rest of us even further.

A less accomplished writer might lose readers in 298 pages (and more than 50 pages of end notes) that attempt to paint a portrait of deceit and double-dealing. In the hands of Sirota, a former congressional aide, a fact-packed page provides riveting exposition.

The declaration by former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan that “the minimum wage does no good,” for instance, sounds like someone scratching a chalkboard when Sirota shows that the minimum wage is nearing a 50-year low when adjusted for inflation, that a full-time worker at the minimum wage earns $5,000 below the official poverty line, and that jobs in the bottom third of the pay scale are growing almost twice as fast as those in the middle. He reveals, in contrast, that corporate CEOs make on average more than $9 million a year, even as corporate interests spend millions of dollars on members of Congress to keep the minimum wage low.

Until I read “Hostile Takeover,” I didn’t realize that in 2004 the credit card industry made $24 billion from penalty fees alone, often using deceptive practices that Congress refuses to outlaw. To increase late fees, for example, some companies hide in fine print that the due date on your bill may not be at the end of a particular day, but at 9 a.m., before that day’s mail arrives.

Sirota argues that such practices are the least of the industry’s sins. In 2005, Congress passed a “bankruptcy reform bill,” seeking to make it harder for people in debt to use bankruptcy to protect their assets. The bill destroyed most of those protections although, according to the book, 75 percent of personal bankruptcies involve not “deadbeats” but individuals who lost health insurance during illness, and that the industry — far from being hurt by bankruptcy abuse — recorded $30 billion in profits in 2004 alone.

As the bankruptcy bill moved through Congress, industry lobbyists and their congressional allies beat back protections for victims of identity theft, soldiers who ran into debt when they left better-paying jobs for service in Iraq and an attempt to cap credit card fees at 30 percent.

Eighteen Senate Democrats who voted against the 30 percent ceiling had supported a tougher 14 percent cap that failed in 1991. What happened between the two votes? As Sirota shows, one thing was that the industry donated $2.3 million to the vote-switchers. He also notes that the author of the bankruptcy bill, Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., owned nearly $250,000 of stock in bank and credit card companies that benefited from the bill, according to the nonpartisan watchdog group Public Campaign.

“Hostile Takeover” marches on in this vein — through chapters on taxes, wages, jobs, pensions, health care, prescription drugs, energy, unions and legal rights. Each chapter documents economic setbacks for Middle Americans caused, according to Sirota, by the interplay among monied interests, Congress and the White House. The author uses chapters to name “heroes” and “hacks,” politicians who he says are standing up for you or selling you out. He also lists specific political steps citizens can advocate to insist on a fair shake from their elected leaders.

As a congressman, I was never comfortable with class-based politics. But having witnessed a quarter century of Robin Hood in reverse, I welcome Sirota’s book. It should open eyes to ways to solve problems besetting workaday families and the cozy political arrangements that often create those problems.

One “Hostile Takeover” shortcoming is Sirota’s unfortunate tendency to slip into absolutist rhetoric. It’s incorrect to even imply that all corporations are predatory. Likewise, Sirota’s occasional use of epithets that question the parentage of his foes is unworthy of an author of his considerable ability.

“Hostile Takeover” is packed with indispensable information and insights. It is an important read in this, the 26th year of mostly trickle-down economics, job-outsourcing, relaxed regulation and tsunami-sized waves of political money.