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The Book on Bush: How George W. (Mis)leads America Hardcover – February 9, 2004
Purchase options and add-ons
- Print length448 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherViking Adult
- Publication dateFebruary 9, 2004
- Dimensions6.46 x 1.41 x 9.62 inches
- ISBN-100670032735
- ISBN-13978-0670032730
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Alterman, the author of What Liberal Media? [BKL F 1 03], and Green, a New York City Democrat, offer a critique of both the president and his policies, with one of their main premises being that Bush starts with conclusions and then finds facts with which to frame them. So how does he make decisions? According to the authors, by asking what the religious right wants, what big business wants, and what the neocons want, and then proceeding accordingly. Chapters on the environment, business fraud, civil liberties, race, education, and, of course, foreign policy offer myriad examples of the authors' theories on how Bush misleads. It's all presented in highly readable fashion, but with the awakening economy and the passage of the Medicare bill, some of the information will seem out date. Those familiar with the anti-Bush canon will find this entry closest to David Corn's Lies of George W. Bush [BKL O 1 03], but Alterman has a higher profile and will make a bigger splash on the news shows.Ilene Cooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
About the Author
From The Washington Post
One mustn't be misled by Eric Alterman and Mark Green's title, The Book on Bush: How George W. (Mis)leads America. Unlike the shelf of recent titles that juxtapose "Bush" and "lies," this volume is not an anti-Dubya screed. Indeed, the authors are polite; they assert mildly that the 43rd president "frequently dissembles." And so they stay above the ad Texasem insults and the snobbish preoccupation with malapropisms that cheapen so many critiques of the Oval Office occupant. Their book is not for partisan hacks; it's for partisan nerds. It offers a fiercely footnoted assault on the incumbent's policies while barely putting a scratch on the man himself.
Yet while the authors have elevated their tone, they haven't expanded their reach. This is not a gospel to make converts, but rather a hymnal for the choir. And that should come as no shock; Alterman is a columnist for the Nation, and Green, an original Nader's Raider, was the Democratic nominee against Michael Bloomberg in the 2001 New York mayoral election. From their port-side perspective, they can find neither plausibility nor popular appeal in the administration's policies -- which means they can't adequately answer the question "If Bush is so bad, how come he's so far ahead?"
We might start where Alterman and Green start: with Bush's energy and environmental policy. From their Manhattan vantage point, they see the administration as one big oil slick of special interests and dirty deeds. They deride Bush's platform as "talk globally, harm locally." They seem particularly wounded over the president's kiboshing of the Kyoto global warming treaty, and yet they neglect to mention the most obvious fact about Kyoto, that the treaty was unacceptable to elected Democrats as well as Republicans. On July 25, 1997, the U.S. Senate voted 95-0 to reject the treaty even before the Clinton administration could submit it -- which, of course, it never did. So beware, Democratic nerds seeking to use this book for your next appearance on "Crossfire": The authors will not help you anticipate the best comebacks from the Republican nerds. Other chapters, with too-clever-by-half titles -- "Déjà Vu-doo Economics," "When Laissez Isn't Fair" -- are similarly one-sided. They argue that Bushonomics is a "proven failure" at creating jobs but never come to grips with the changes in the cyber-economy that have made the decline of manufacturing jobs a quarter-century-long trend. And by the way, would enacting the Kyoto treaty pump up employment in Michigan? Yet even the authors are forced to concede (kinda, sorta) that Bushonomics has done O.K.: "In the short term, President Bush's stimulative policies . . . should produce the illusion of adequate growth for his 2004 election."
Alterman and Green laid a trap for themselves when they set out to write a comprehensive critique of all Bush policies, on everything from AIDS to the World Trade Organization; not all Bush policies are equally vulnerable to attack. The authors complain, for example, that in the wake of Sept. 11 Bush reversed the Clinton policy of "presumed disclosure to one of presumed closure," without ever acknowledging the longstanding bipartisan concern over the spillage of nuclear secrets into the public domain -- and into foreign hands. On other occasions, they drift into generalized attacks on the Republican Party as a whole. Is it really Bush's fault -- or even Karl Rove's -- that Republican activists allegedly tried to suppress the black vote in Maryland, Arkansas and Louisiana?
It's not until the last half of the book, as the authors shift from domestic to foreign policy, that their criticism rises above the level of advanced-placement Democratic National Committee talking points. Indeed, Alterman and Green are at their most effective when they merely remind the reader of what Bush has had to say about the doctrine that bears his name, such as, "The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity." That's not in my Bible; the words sound more like those of a Jesus-freaked Rudyard Kipling carrying a very big stick. To be sure, some readers will savor those Michael Gersonesque words and praise God for Bush's moral clarity. But others will agree with the authors, who suggest that the Bush Doctrine is a "formula for endless war in the service of a global empire."
In The Book on Bush's view, the only folks who should like the Texan are "extremist elements of the Republican Party -- the religious right, Fortune 500 CEOs, especially those from the oil patch, and neoconservative ideologues." Yet plainly, his support is much broader than that, and by the last page the reader is still wondering why that could be so. About the closest the authors come to answering the question is their jibe that "the conviction that God is his copilot has saved Bush a great deal of time and worry as to how to proceed."
Today, most polls still show that a majority of Americans want Bush to continue on as their pilot. And this tome -- Manhattan's revenge against Midland -- is not likely to change that electoral flight plan.
Reviewed by James P. Pinkerton
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
Product details
- Publisher : Viking Adult (February 9, 2004)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 448 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0670032735
- ISBN-13 : 978-0670032730
- Item Weight : 1.65 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.46 x 1.41 x 9.62 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #6,105,622 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,561 in Political Leadership
- #4,811 in United States Executive Government
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Eric Alterman is Distinguished Professor of English, Brooklyn College, City University of New York. From 1995-2020, he was The Nation’s “Liberal Media" columnist and is now a contributing writer to the magazine and also to The American Prospect. In the past, he has been a senior fellow of the Center for American Progress, the World Policy Institute and The Nation Institute, a columnist for Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, The Guardian, The Daily Beast, MSNBC.com, The Forward, Moment and the Sunday Express (London) as well as a contributor to The New Yorker, The Atlantic and Le Monde Diplomatique, among other publications. Alterman has also been named a Media Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a Schusterman Foundation Fellow at Brandeis University, a Fellow of the Society of American Historians and a member of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.
Alterman is the author of the national bestseller What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News, as well eleven other books, including We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel, published late in 2022 by Basic Books, which was added to The New Yorker’s list of the best books of that year after both the list was initially published. In past years, he has won the George Orwell Prize, the Stephen Crane Literary Award and the Mirror Award for media criticism (twice). Alterman holds a PhD in US history from Stanford (minoring in Jewish Studies), an M.A. in international relations at Yale and a B.A. from Cornell. He lives in Manhattan and tweets at @eric_alterman and has an open Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/alterman.eric
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Where to begin? The facts speak for themselves. No president-ever-has done more to inflame and divide the Nation's citizens and alienate its allies; broaden the disparity between rich and poor; despoil the environment; trample on the Constitution; disdain Science; publicly promote religion; gut Education; and burden the Nation with soon-to-be trillion dollar debt that, if left unchecked, will ruin the average man and woman's standard of living for generations to come and reduce our standing in the world from a superpower to a has-been. Oh, and he started a "dubyious" war, whose rationales have been changed more often than a newborn's Pampers. Not bad for three plus years in office.
No administration-ever-has raised hypocrisy and outright lying to the level of an art form as has Bush and his cronies. The fraud has reached Orwellian proportions: black is white and white is black and gray doesn't exist; bait-and-switch and deception have become Republican parlor games; manipulation of the facts and sleight of mind gull a mouth-breathing press so efficaciously that even David Blaine sits up in amazement. His politics is a direct reflection of his neo-Calvinist persona: Us and Them; Privileged and everyone else. Either you're with us or against us. In his world-view, life is a zero-sum game and your "contribution" is measured by the dollars you've accumulated-in Dubya's case, handed to him-and where greed is not merely countenanced, but revered. His is a world where whoever dies with the most money is the one who wins. G. W. Bush is a man without honor, ignorant of life's complexities, and whose only tool is the hammer of the Big Lie.
To say that he is a cynic is to give Dubya too much credit. Cynicism implies a thought process in which opposing ideas and outcomes are weighed one against the other and the philosophical inference drawn from this calculus is that the world is headed to hell in a handcart. Dubya has neither the means nor the inclination to arrive at reasoned conclusions. He is a Believer. He knows that he is right because he knows that he is right, and that saying so makes it so. It is primitive, but, for far too many people, persuasive. Never having bothered to learn to think critically, Dubya is himself easily manipulated, and this is where his tenure in office becomes truly scary. He is merely the face and the pitchman for a gradually evolving and well-funded, but a dare-not-speak-its-name, movement in this country toward Fascism. Conspiracy theory? Was Hilary Clinton deluded when she attributed the assaults on her and her husband to a "vast right-wing conspiracy"? In fact, the identities and beliefs of these individuals and their families are widely known, so much so that they hardly deserve the appellation "conspirators." These monied entities couldn't be more thrilled than to have this puppet with the elongated proboscis in the Oval Office. This is the "Nation" that G. W. Bush represents, and his performance has far exceeded their wildest dreams.
When it comes to sheer chutzpah and brazen partisan goose-stepping, Dubya beats Reagan hands down. If there is such a thing as "Evil," which the President, having been advised by the Big Guy Himself, assures us there is, then every one of us has reason to tremble in fear: our fate is in Their hands.
Alterman and Green begin with an introduction entitled, "The Power of Audacity," which I think sums up the Bush strategy only too well. When Bush was faced with the prospect of lukewarm support for his longing to invade Iraq, he simply came up with the Big Lie. Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction that he is planning to use against the United States, and he is in cahoots with Al Qaeda in planning further terrorist attacks. It has been said that if you're going to tell a lie you might as well tell a big one. Bush may even be aware of this quote from the author of Mein Kampf: "The great masses of people...will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one."
The authors go on to show where George W. learned his audacity. From the Harken Energy insider trading that he got away with, to his irresponsible governorship of Texas, to his cozy relationship with Ken Lay at Enron (which he later denied), to his campaign prevarications about never using the US military for nation building or the No Child Left Behind rhetoric that he failed to support with adequate funding, etc., etc., we are treated to a kind of true crime thriller in which the bad guy is a sort of hail fellow well met (on the wagon of course), a good ole boy who steals from the poor and gives to the rich.
Alterman and Green have chapters on Bush's "Deja Vu-doo Economics," highlighting his anti-environmental energy policies while he thumbs his nose at pollution control and the development of renewable energy sources. There is information on what the authors call Bush's "large portfolio of antiscience policies." (p. 147) Indeed, as I write this, scores of senators and congressmen are petitioning the president to allow increased stem cell research in an effort to fight Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and other scourges of humankind. But Bush continues to play a kind of reincarnation of the ignorant William Jennings Bryan who thought he had defeated "the infidels of evolution at the Scopes Trail of 1925." Also highlighted is the fact that, although the scientific evidence is overwhelming as glaciers melt around the world, Bush continues to deny that the case for global warming has been made and has called for more studies, effectively ignoring the problem.
The authors however don't think that George W. is quite as dumb and self-deceptive as many others believe. They write "we think him dumb like a fox." Nonetheless they charge that "George W. Bush entered office with less understanding of American history and the world than probably any twentieth-century predecessor." Add that to Bush's appalling lack of scientific knowledge and his dismal ignorance about other peoples and other cultures, and we have one of the most ignorant men ever to occupy the White House. Perhaps the double-edged nature of the real George W. Bush can be summed up with these ironic words from neocon strategist Richard Perle, "The first time I met Bush 43, I knew he was different...One, he didn't know very much. The other was that he had the confidence to ask questions that revealed he didn't know very much." (p. 3)
All these stupidities and prevarications are explored in full, and more, leaving us to wonder how we got into this mess in the first place. Blame the Supreme Court (and by extension, the previous presidents, especially Reagan and Bush 41 who appointed those justices)? Or blame the media for being too cowardly to expose Bush's lies on the campaign trail? Or blame a semi-educated electorate? Personally I blame the nature of the electoral process in which TV and other advertising can swing an election toward the candidate with the most money.
And what about the consequences of having this guy in office? The really terrible thing about George W. Bush is that he has so often taken the position that truth in politics is the way to go, that he would bring honesty and integrity to a White House soiled by the presence of a philanderer; yet the truth is that the one shameful lie that Clinton told caused no one to die, while the lies of George W. Bush have (at last count) caused over 800 American soldiers to die in Iraq, with thousands injured, to say nothing of tens of thousands of Iraqi dead. And for what? To provide Al Qaeda with a $200-billion recruiting poster?
In other words, not only has George W. Bush mislead the American people, he has caused grievous harm in the process. The massive treasury giveaway to his corporate buddies is something we and our children will pay for again and again over the next couple of decades. The loss of international prestige we suffer because of his misuse of American power and his disregard for the welfare of others is something we will all have to live with for years to come.
It is too bad that the startling information in this book will reach only a very small percentage of the electorate. One hopes, however, that enough of it will trickle down so that the most mendacious president in our history--perhaps even topping Richard Milhouse Nixon in premeditated lies--will be shown the door come November, 2004.
Another good read in a similar vein is The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception (2003) by David Corn.