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The Book on Bush : How George W. (Mis)leads America

The Book on Bush : How George W. (Mis)leads America

List Price: $49.95
Your Price: $19.98
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: you think we want the truth?
Review: Okay Mr Alterman and Mr Green maybe misunderstand something about our so-called misleader. Let me tell you the truth. The American people do not want the truth. President Bush does not want the truth. Americans want to elect someone like them. Some one who doesnt tell the truth. Someone who does not see the need to tell the truth. Telling the truth is not what survival in the capitalist system is all about. Survival means covering your rear. People get up in the morning and work their nine to five job and go home to their family. Do you think they are truthful at their job? Do you think their boss wants to hear the truth? And similarly with family interaction. Now if the president was to be totally honest people would see that as a weakness. It would like standing before everyone naked. We are a mendacious people and we want a president who will get away with whatever he can get away with. We do not want some goody two shoes. We want a hypocrite. Why else do republicans keep on winning so many elections? Because they are good brainwashers? I do not buy that particular theory. People identify with Bush. They want to be as good a liar as he is. If Bushes popularity is going down thats only because he isnt lying as effectively as he used to.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Bush and Bushshi***
Review: Once again we have another great book that has come on the market to help educate the American people about the dangers of President Bush. Fortunately this book uses factual evidence to show us how Bush has mislead America to fund his own private political agenda.

A frightening yet informative read.

David

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: An excellent addition to the growing number of Books on Bush
Review: Only six months ago, there was a dearth of good books on George W. Bush's presidency. Then, beginning in late summer 2003 a spate of books started coming out, from Paul Krugman's THE GREAT UNRAVELING to Joe Conason's BIG LIES to Al Franken's LIES AND THE LYING LIARS and Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose's BUSHWHACKED and Scott Ritter's FRONTIER JUSTICE and David Corn's THE LIES OF GEORGE W. BUSH. Now we are seeing a second wave of books. It began with Ron Suskind's THE PRICE OF LOYALTY and Kevin Phillips's AMERICAN DYNASTY, and we will shortly be seeing Australian philosopher Peter Singer's THE PRESIDENT OF GOOD AND EVIL and Mark Crispin Miller's CRUEL AND UNUSUAL: BUSH/CHENEY'S NEW WORLD ORDER. Given this thick pack of books, is there room for yet one more? In other words, Do we really need Eric Alterman and Mark Green's THE BOOK ON BUSH: HOW GEORGE W. BUSH (MIS)LEADS AMERICA?

The answer is yes and no. It is no in the sense that there is very little in this book that one who has read the bulk of the books above will not already have encountered. I have read all of the above-mentioned books (except for the two forthcoming titles), and I learned very little from this new book by Alterman and Green. However, I will add that this is probably the best single-volume summation of the presidential record of George W. Bush that I have encountered. The authors do a marvelous job of systematically organizing Bush's record of deception. What is especially effective is the historical approach they take to each area of deception. For instance, they may begin with his approach to an issue while governor of Texas, and then move on to statements he made during the 2000 campaign (which frequently clashed strongly with his actual policies upon assuming office), and finally to the history of his statements during the course of the three years of his presidency. The topics covered include his environmental policies; his economic policies (or lack therefore, since he really hasn't articulated any policies apart from blindly cutting taxes regardless of what the situation calls for); his handling of the rampant fraud in companies like Enron, World Com, and Andersen; his assault on civil liberties; his mania for privatization of healthcare and his passion for tort reform to limit pain and suffering jury awards (in my day job I work for one of the largest medical insurers of hospitals in the world, and I can't generate the tiniest bit of sympathy for his suggestions); his policies on race; his education policy; his attitudes towards science and his mania for replacing scientific experts with ideologues; his judicial appointments; his sympathy for NRA gun policies; his embracing of preemptive foreign policy; the fiasco in Iraq and the failure to address the problem of terrorism; the bullying nature of American foreign policy and the alienation of many nations formerly friendly with us; and his sense of messianism, his belief that he is an instrument of God's will.

In every instance, Alterman and Green do a tremendous job of teasing out the misdirection and deception in the various public statements by the Bush administration. They fully document the errors contained in Bush's positions, and all in all provide an extremely comprehensive guide to the history (so far) of his administration. If one is reading one's first book on Bush, I would recommend this one and the volume by Ivins and Dubose above all others.

My lone complaint with the book is that the authors often talk in the language of liberal versus conservative. More and more I have come to consider this an unhelpful distinction in today's political climate. The Democratic party can hardly be considered a liberal party today. They tend to be fairly liberal on social issues, but overwhelmingly conservative on economic issues. On the other hand, if one has studies the history of conservativism to any degree at all, it is impossible to deny that there is no connection between conservative political thought as traditionally conceived and the prime movers in today's Republican party. When Alterman and Green talk of Bush espousing a conservative position, they are simply wrong. Bush is right wing without being conservative. Not everyone on the left is liberal, since socialists and anarchists and Marxists detest liberals as much as they hate the Right. Likewise, the current GOP hates true conservatives. Just as with the Left, the Right can contain Libertarians, classical Conservatives, Nazis, and Fascists, all of whom hate one another. Bush hold to a right wing ideology that elevates the investment class above all others, that embraces an aggressive preemptive foreign policy that has no roots in conservative thought, and elevates religious considerations to a damaging degree. In the face of this, Alterman and Green hold to an exceedingly simplistic Liberal/Conservative dichotomy.

Still, this is a very good book, and unless one has read eight or nine other books on Bush's administration, one will be able to learn a very great deal from reading this.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Tells it like it is in the Bush Administration...
Review: Please don't be turned off on this book from some of the other reviewers with an obvious agenda (i.e. an extreme right-wing agenda) who bash this book. The authors present facts about how the current administration has and continues to mislead the American public in many different areas. This book should not be lumped into the same category as Iven's and Franken's recent offerings, it is much more technical and goes into excruciating detail when making it's points. Read this and judge for yourself. Btw, take what "Doctor" James S. Moore says with a grain of salt... for a sec there I thought he was a real doctor, but I wasn't suprised to discover he is really a psychologist. Look at his other reviews if you don't believe me, the guy's a crackpot.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Idiot
Review: R.b.Crook you are an idiot. I read your reviews they all say the same thing. You are the brainwashed one and im surprised youve read so many anti bush books. lol! You are the reason abortion should be legal.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The Manchurian President
Review: Read this book!

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.


Rating: 1 stars
Summary: self promoting auther
Review: Self serving attempt to make a quick buck off of terriosm. Author lacks clear facts, uses to many "undisclosed sources".

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A good but hard read
Review: Takes a little effort to read. Leaves you in a depressed mood. Well documented. Depicts the action after the words. Should be required reading for those who think it makes no difference who you vote for because they think the outcome is always the same.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Depressing, but important
Review: The Book on Bush

"The Book on Bush" is a tough read, in more ways than one. Style-wise, it isn't as entertaining as "What Liberal Media," the book that turned me on to Eric Alterman, but I don't think that this book was written in an effort to draw people to the arguments it contains (which, I believe, "W.L.M?" was); I figure that Alterman and Green wrote it more as a political science report, and with (probably, liberal) policy junkies as an intended audience. The other way in which it is hard to read is that it is depressing.

That said, I think more people should read it. Particularly right-wing policy junkies.

It seems to go through all of the Bush policies that I can remember and details, a, what Bush claimed for each initiative, b, what Bush did to get the initiative enacted, c, what each initiative actually caused to be, and, d, how the Administration actually supported each initiative once enacted.

Like I said, pretty depressing (even for old-school conservatives, probably; the neo-cons never ran so wild when the old-school conservatives were in charge as they do now).

My guess is that a lot of people who reflexively support Bush will gripe about this book. Another guess of mine is that a lot of people who support Bush don't actually follow the policies of his administration that closely, and will assume that this book is written by Bush haters that will make stuff up to defend an ideological position. I understand that; most of the (monolithic?) right's most successful writers do that so often that, to them, it seems fair to assume that the left does the same thing.

As it happens, the (better) books (like this one) that come from the left are actually researched and (credibly) foot-noted. Which is to say, "Bush Lovers, read this at your own peril (and weep)."

The main thing I got from this book is the confidence to ask people who still support Bush as President the question "Why?" Whichever policy stance they claim as a reason to still like the guy, I'll be able to say "but don't you know, he actually told the Congress 'x' and then did 'y?'"

If you need thoughtful ammunition of this sort, buy this book; if you need a 'cheer me up, I'm depressed about where the country is currently going,' sort of book, you might skip this and re-read some Elmore Leonard (which won't help, either, but won't make your blues worse).

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Depressing, but important
Review: The Book on Bush

"The Book on Bush" is a tough read, in more ways than one. Style-wise, it isn't as entertaining as "What Liberal Media," the book that turned me on to Eric Alterman, but I don't think that this book was written in an effort to draw people to the arguments it contains (which, I believe, "W.L.M?" was); I figure that Alterman and Green wrote it more as a political science report, and with (probably, liberal) policy junkies as an intended audience. The other way in which it is hard to read is that it is depressing.

That said, I think more people should read it. Particularly right-wing policy junkies.

It seems to go through all of the Bush policies that I can remember and details, a, what Bush claimed for each initiative, b, what Bush did to get the initiative enacted, c, what each initiative actually caused to be, and, d, how the Administration actually supported each initiative once enacted.

Like I said, pretty depressing (even for old-school conservatives, probably; the neo-cons never ran so wild when the old-school conservatives were in charge as they do now).

My guess is that a lot of people who reflexively support Bush will gripe about this book. Another guess of mine is that a lot of people who support Bush don't actually follow the policies of his administration that closely, and will assume that this book is written by Bush haters that will make stuff up to defend an ideological position. I understand that; most of the (monolithic?) right's most successful writers do that so often that, to them, it seems fair to assume that the left does the same thing.

As it happens, the (better) books (like this one) that come from the left are actually researched and (credibly) foot-noted. Which is to say, "Bush Lovers, read this at your own peril (and weep)."

The main thing I got from this book is the confidence to ask people who still support Bush as President the question "Why?" Whichever policy stance they claim as a reason to still like the guy, I'll be able to say "but don't you know, he actually told the Congress 'x' and then did 'y?'"

If you need thoughtful ammunition of this sort, buy this book; if you need a 'cheer me up, I'm depressed about where the country is currently going,' sort of book, you might skip this and re-read some Elmore Leonard (which won't help, either, but won't make your blues worse).


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