Idiots in Charge

Nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes." --Tom DeLay, America's Community Bankers meeting, March 12, 2003

* After revealing absurd 911 phone calls and America's dumbest criminal antics, former Saturday Night Live writer Leland Gregory skewers political pandering and pen-pushing philosophizing.

Leland Gregory generates the best laughs by exposing the worst of human nature. Inside Idiots in Charge: Lies, Trick, Misdeeds, and Other Political Untruthiness Gregory offers more than 250 accounts of bumbling bureaucrats on both sides of political party lines:

* David Spellman became mayor of Black Hawk, Colo., on July 12, 2006, a week after pleading guilty to felony menacing and third-degree assault for pistol-whipping his wife with a handgun and firing three shots in 2005.

* County officials in Vermillion, Ind., were told by state homeland security officials in July 2006 to stop using the special emergency-only highway message boards to advertise their charity fish fries and spaghetti dinners.

* District 1 Town Councilor David Watson resigned from his position as council vice chairman on January 23, 2007, after unintentionally forwarding an e-mail to 18 members of the New Elementary School Building Committee. The e-mail contained nine embedded images of topless women under the heading "This Is National Women's Breast Awareness Day." The only other text in the e-mail read, "Beats . . . Martin Luther King Day, doesn't it?"