Public Policy Hooligan - Rollicking and Wrangling from Helltown to Washington

Public Policy Hooligan is the rollicking true story of a good American boy gone to the dark side. James Bovard was raised in the mountains of Virginia near a hamlet formerly known as Helltown. But within a few years of becoming an Eagle Boy Scout, he was busted on trumped-up armed robbery charges, entangled in heroin smuggling, and even worked as a highway department flagman. His record also included stints as a Santa Claus and census taker.

The trouble really began when he decided to become a writer. After he moved to Washington, his articles were publicly denounced by the director of the FBI, the Postmaster General, the Secretary of HUD, and the heads of the DEA, FEMA, and EEOC - and even the Washington Post. Public Policy Hooligan reveals how Bovard heisted damning documents from World Bank headquarters, raced around East Bloc regimes one step ahead of the secret police, and was ejected from the Supreme Court for an alleged apparel atrocity. Readers may enjoy the collisions between Bovard’s rustic ways and the Beltway’s kowtowing protocols.

This book is also the chronicle of one person striving to better understand liberty and Leviathan. His rabble-rousing in Playboy, New York Times, and elsewhere exposed how cherished constitutional rights were depreciating into mere bureaucratic asterisks and how the nation was turning into an Attention Deficit Democracy. The Wall Street Journal labeled him “the roving inspector general of the modern state,” and Hooligan divulges some of the capers behind his most controversial exposes.

Two vignettes from the book (the Santa Claus confessions and the shiftless highway department worker story) have been excerpted by the Wall Street Journal.

Like Bovard’s earlier books, Hooligan is chockful of epigrams. Here are a few samples:

* Expecting uplift from politicians is like expecting burglars to leave Gideon’s Bibles in every house they plunder.

* Truth delayed is truth defused.

* I had always heard that “you can’t fight City Hall.” But maybe it was possible to intellectually demolish it.

* The more good deeds people supposedly commit, the more deluded they sometimes become.

* I have spent decades trying to turn political dirt into philosophic gold. I have yet to discover the alchemist’s trick, but I still have fun with the dirt.

* It was nuts to permit politicians to control prices when there was no way to control politicians.

* I did not recognize the FBI’s prerogative to re-write the facts on its killings.

* Regardless of how many crimes a government commits, it will have legions of apologists among intellectuals, pundits, bankers, and politicians.

* The less scrutiny federal agencies receive, the more absurd their rulings become.

* I smelled a policy rat.

* Economic common sense never had a chance inside the Beltway.

* Washington editors claim a droit du seigneur to screw any prose they published.

* I had no faith in shaming the perpetrators. I preferred to awaken the victims.