Rating: 
Summary: Despite agreeing with the author, a very disappointing book
Review: I completely agree with David Corn's assessment of George W. Bush's struggle with personal honesty, and would go a step further and insist that is his most probably the most dishonest president in the history of our nation. When he writes, "So constant is [Bush's] fibbing that a history of his lies offers a close approximation of the history of his presidential tenure, " he makes as profound a statement about the nature of this administration as is possible. Moreover, I found myself virtually never disagreeing with any statement that he makes in the course of the entire book. Also, as one of the key figures in covering the current (as I write this) story of two White House senior aides blowing the cover of Joseph Wilson's CIA agent wife, I am grateful to his superb journalist efforts over the years.So why am I not thrilled with the book? Because it is more or less just a laundry list of lies, and not a great deal more. It is a one-note song. My complaint is not with the book that it is, but with the book that it should have been. After cataloging Bush's lies for over three hundred pages, I think only the most partisan of individuals could deny that Bush has a problem with truth telling. The man is patently dishonest, and the book performs a valuable service by articulating all the ways that he engages in dishonesty. But at the end of the book, I found myself dissatisfied in many ways. Why this enormous reliance on disinformation in the Bush White House? Does it originate from him or from his advisors or from some ongoing movement in the Republican right wing (I believe it is all three)? What does this reliance on distortion and misleading the public say about American culture? Why has the media, until recently, been unwilling to call Bush to the carpet on some of his more outrageous errors? Or why couldn't Corn have discussed the question of whether it is possible to be honest in today's political climate? This is not nitpicking: these are the kinds of questions that would arise for any reasonably intelligent person reading the book. I also have some trouble with using "lie" when in fact Bush's struggles with the truth are far more multifarious. For instance, often what he says, while wrong, may be things he actually believes, for instance when he calls Ariel Sharon a man of peace. No one who knows anything about Sharon could possibly make that assessment (indeed, his political base in Israel supports him precisely because he is not a man of peace), but when Bush says that, it is a lie, or a belief based either in ignorance or self-deception? For something to qualify as a lie, one must consciously know that what one is saying is not true. In other words, I believe a lot of the untrue things that Bush says is based on an inability to assess the truth of a situation. Not every mistaken statement qualifies as a lie. Mind you, Bush does lie, but many of his false statements are not, as such, lies. Some are mistakes of fact. Some result from his ability to convince himself that something is true that isn't. A gigantic amount of what he says is simply PR or propaganda, such as calling his deregulation of environmental standards a "Clear Skies" program (whereas it is in fact merely a license to pollute). This is clearly dishonest, and while there is a bit of the lie in all propaganda, it doesn't come up to the level of a lie. Spinning a situation isn't lying so much as attempting to color the facts in a way that is more sympathetic to one's own agenda. Dishonest, yet, but a lie, no. I would have been more comfortable if the title of the book had been THE DISHONESTY OF GEORGE W. BUSH. Nonetheless, the book is very definitely not without value, but of the recent spate of books critical of the Right and the Bush administration, this is not one of the best. Paul Krugman in THE GREAT UNRAVELING deals with much of the dishonesty inherent in the Bush administration (Krugman was, in fact, the first journalist I know of to explicitly call Bush a liar). Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose in BUSHWHACKED go into great detail about not merely the dishonesty of the Bush policies but the concrete ways in which they harm real human beings. On a humorous level, Al Franken tackles Right wing (including Bush) dishonesty in a way that is both accurate and hysterical. I would recommend all of these before Corn's book.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Coverage of All of the Issues
Review: David Corn has a great grasp of all of the issues. He leads us through the Bush campaign, to the Florida vote to the war in Iraq. His arguments are well supported, well researched and well articulated. The level of culpability of GW for his behavior is always discussed with a second or third look at the context and the counter-arguements. But, then Corn delivers a scathing punch and Bush's lie on a specific issue is exposed. This book is a little bit bogged down in details for the average reader. I'm afraid it will only appeal to the intellectual and only preach to the choir. Still it's a good history and it adds to the debate on how George Bush has lied and mislead the country into potentially unaffordable tax cuts, dangerous rollbacks of environmental protections, and a cauldron of terrorism in Iraq.
Rating: 
Summary: The Lies of George W. Bush
Review: I am glad that David Corn decided to focus only on the most important and biggest of Bush's lies because I don't have the money to buy a multi-volume book collection right now. This is a great book that points out many of the lies and deceptions that Bush and his administration have piled on us since they "took" office. * Brazenly mischaracterizing intelligence and resorting to deceptive arguments to whip up public support for war with Iraq.
* Misrepresenting the provisions and effects of the president's supersized tax cuts.
* Offering misleading explanations- instead of telling the full truth - about the 9/11 attacks.
* Lying about connections to corporate crooks.
* Presenting deceptive and disingenuous claims to sell controversial policies on the environment, stem cell research, missile defense, Social Security, white-collar crime, abortion, energy, and other crucial issues.
* Running a truth-defying, down-and-dirty campaign during the 2000 presidential contest and recount drama. And more.... Highly Recommended
Rating:
Summary: Very revealing...
Review: I found this book to be very revealing. It should be a "must read" for everyone, on both the right and the left. This book thoroughly documents the times when Bush and the Administration have ducked, dodged, misled, and otherwise twisted the facts on a whole range of subjects, from tax cuts to the energy bill to the 9/11 commission to the war in Iraq. The author does point out where it is impossible to determine if the deception was deliberate or possibly the result of misinformation. What I found particularly interesting are the times (multiple) when Bush stated one viewpoint or "fact", then, when proved wrong, either insisted that the viewpoint was not wrong, or changed the viewpoint and insisted he hadn't. This book clearly shows how Bush seems to be even more incapable than most politicians of informing the public of true facts, or of sticking to his promises.
Rating: 
Summary: Is Porn On Bin Laden, Chirac and Schroeder's Payrolls???????
Review:
This yellow-journalism's absolute spoilage!!!! To educate how low-mindedly UNCONSCIENTIOUS this yellow-journalism is, obese Michael Moore's tripe runs chances of impersonating more "credibility"-at least his crap's got maltreated "sources" which he faultily contrives as "arguments". Porn's quintessential Über-Elitist, rejecting any doubtfulness his character-assassination piece might incur, arrogantly imposing his pollution baselessly. Judging from irremediable-gone patsies ranting about this, he lures GULLIBLE simpletons to his partisanship. The aggressively programmed zombie-reviewers (more resembling tortuously brainwashed agents who're recruited to disseminate liberals' propaganda) who fanatically impose a slippery "journalist's" smut-libel MUST suspiciously endure onset of psychological diseases because Porn's animosity-screed just plays meanly to the most terminal of discriminatingly prejudged biases, where Bush is derided from everything profane like "warmonger" to "Antichrist". I'm repulsed Porn's apparently an editor-insinuating mastery of linguistics-and has scribbled two novels, because his writing style, word choice are BORING as hell, invariant and only flow in crippled excruciation!!!! Porn's diseased in maltreating the frequency of hyphenated compounds, stressfully compressing phrases better suited in clauses into compounds.
Porn's yellow-journalism WON'T be taken half-seriously because this Über-Elitist refuses to be double-checked by confessing his supposed "sources"!!!! That alone disqualifies this tripe's merit; mercifully giving "benefit of the doubt" by reading his yellow-journalism beyond this hamper even unmasks further scandalous craftiness. Confessing liberals have NO LICIT reasons to daydream about charging Bush, a disconcerting exorbitance of Porn's "exposes" is NITPICKING. In Chapter One, he abuses Bush for "lying" about the Children's Health Insurance Program because Bush delayed its inception so he could designate money to facilitate Texas' 1997 tax cuts. Porn demonizes Bush as the bastard who "played politics" with 200,000 kids' health despite CHIP was passed, and Bush had important fiscal reasons to delay its progressiveness.
Inexcusable is Porn's unrelenting presumption of probing secret, "insider-knowledge", via "quoting" endless snippets from persons ranging from press secretaries, testifiers and fellow reporters. In this mendacious ploy, Porn can never be double-checked, infiltrating his ungrounded malignity however manipulatively he wants. On page 57, the first James Baker quote CANNOT be confirmed-on Google, it doesn't appear anywhere!!!! Third-parties are killed from ascertaining Porn's believability, which massacres the case his yellow-journalism plans to "establish". Porn misappropriates Baker's quote concerning Demoncrats' bitchy complaints over Bush "stealing the election", citing it to "unmask" Republican lies regarding manual recounts' dependability. Baker professed manual recounts were imprecise, confirmed by establishment of vote-counting machines. Porn uses MORE subterfuge to strugglingly disprove Baker's assessment, one which he shamelessly mistreats throughout. Porn simply misuses "studies" "papers" like the NYT conducted by procuring experts to substantiate them, which is useless. Like in court, ANYONE recruits experts to substantiate their side because it deconstructs to differences of opinion rather than fact, yet Porn hijacks that NYT study as an overruling law.
Porn's slaughtered in his charges that Bush's tax cuts won't instigate growth, since Dec.2003 birthed 8.2% GDP, the best consumer-confidence since the 80s, and positive payroll additions. Frailly unqualified to analyze economics, Porn gloats "exposing" Bush's tax cuts for the rich-the only smattering of credibility in his yellow-journalism!!!! Porn abuses this redeemableness by exaggerating and scolding Bush so gloomily over the most forgivable, annoying and harmless "lies". Supposedly in August 2001, Bush's tax cuts backslid the estimated $125,000,000,000 surplus into $9,000,000,000 deficit. Besides that deficit being manageable, statistics proved Bush's 2001 tax cuts salvaged the recession from worsening-yet Porn corrodes Bush as a mockery. Similarly, Porn focuses shoddily and dissatisfiedly on ever trivial specifics, like Bush's advertisement that low-income taxpayers' income-tax liability would be helped more than millionaires', which was true. Porn resorts to conjectures, "philosophizing" that in real-life terms, this deduction was "meaningless". When Porn CAN'T crucify Bush in the legitimacy of his pledges (which his yellow-journalism's supposed to "divulge"), he strategizes secondary ways to discredit Bush, like the aforementioned, out-of-context misappropriation.
Porn's yellow-journalism's crappy regarding domestic analysis. It CAREENS into utmost purgatory in stumblingly mishandling foreign policy. In Chapter Nine, this schizophrenic brutalizes Bush for "misdirecting" folks about terrorists' real motivations because Bush said they detest freedom. A miserably "good" liberal, Porn imposes people are SO stupid and dependent they couldn't themselves research terrorists' real motives if they felt Bush's simplification wasn't detailed enough!!!! Distressingly, Porn sounds like a terrorist-coddler in his sympathetic explanation of terrorists' motivations, regardless of their damaging perilousness to American interests, like creating fundamentalist Islamic countries. Another holocaustic prevarication Porn connives is tarnishing the Admin. for "cunningly" hiding Afghan civilians' deaths during bombings. Intractably insanely, Porn persecutes Rumsfeld to report civilian deaths although Rumsfeld was essentially correct, that they didn't have verifiable information to relay because those "reports" came from the worst unscientific estimates of not-independently-confirmed eye "witnesses". That opportunistic devil Porn squanders ten pages rebuking the Admin. for those contraband accusations.
Sorrowfully unoriginally, Porn lowly PLAGIARIZES stalely worn-down libel regarding Iraq's war that's been circulating since before the war and since the Admin. hasn't YET located WMD INSTANTLY in a country California's size, and battles a regime specializing in clandestinely equivocating illegal programs from prying eyes. Examples are Porn ruinously maltreating harmlessly spurious Niger-Uranium allegations over a callousness of pages, despite Italians delivered those forged papers, and America DIDN'T qualify its war argument on that paltry charge. Porn exhibits the Demoncratic affliction of terrorist-shielding by challenging Hussein should've been spared because he didn't have "massive" stockpiles of banned weaponry, though minute amounts are criteria enough to consider DEADLY. Porn dares contest Hussein's Al-Qaeda connections through illegitimate conjecture, inventing that Ansar-al-Islam associate al-Zarqawi was a "rival" of Al-Qaeda, still received Al-Qaeda funding though being "independent", and isn't sworn Al-Qaeda while Porn admits "they have common goals". Porn's guile is lifted from "secret" German records and incognito "analysts".
Rating:
Summary: Liars, damned liars, and Bush
Review: We know the President lies. But what this book confirms is far deeper than that.
It is that Bush's ENTIRE RECORD consists of lies.
Consider the self-righteous indignation that greeted Clinton's lie concerning sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky...told in part to protect the office of the President and three women: Lewinsky, Hilary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton...all of whom would be damaged in their personal lives by the truth.
Clinton's record, however, is not a series of lies as is Bush's.
It is an old maxim, from Plato to Kant, that a lie is an offense against truth which damages trust. As a result of Bush's continuous lying, half the country has for its sanity to reside in a fantasy zone, as does the poster below, where his inability to use Google "proves" nothing at all.
Political views become lifestyle, more an expression of a demented personality's desire for attention than anything else.
Grammar and syntax break down, as in the case where Sen. McCain's questioning of Bush's attendance at a Bob Jones University (sic!) function becomes the accusation that MCCAIN is accusing Bush of anti-Catholicism.
The event's text is searched, in other words, for the most convenient charge by crudely rearranging words.
And, the language is damaged by even calling this "mastery".
Basing our political views on methodological individualism and not seeing how groups, including speechwriters and flaks, Manufacture Consent, Bush becomes in the language of old-fashioned mastery a perverted cynosure.
Let's see. The "losers" are men of honor like Sen. McCain and the theodicy searches their resume for "defects of character" in order to avoid the conclusion that yes indeed, there are "conspiracies", the biggest to be a takeover of all three branches of government by corporations.
"Mastery" becomes empirical and measured by the appearance of success and the approbation of fools.
But "mastery" in this context needs to be renarrated as enslavement. There are clear indications (the non-firing of Rumsfeld being one) that Bush is the willing slave of a cabal of evil men, like the Gimp in the box in the basement, in Pulp Fiction.
Needed at this juncture is not Yet Another catalog of Bush's iniquities, and frankly, Peter Singer's book The President of Good and Evil: Taking George Bush Seriously has more depth.
Instead we can usefully regard Bush as a creature of our times, and our dark desires.
For some time in America, real rats and fools have become rich and famous. Because of this, the language changes to accomodate, simultaneously, the Rat Victories and the vastly more predominate cases where Nice Guys Finish Last.
In the 1950s, Sammy Glick and Willy Loman could be narrated as ultimate Losers in the emptiness, whether of Sammy Glick's material success or Loman's failure.
The problem, as stated in the creaky and deductive philosophy of Spinoza, is clear. If we at all admire, esteem, look up to, or even suck up to a Bush clone, whether on the national stage or the office, we are asserting values that contradict our natural instinct to eat bread and salt and speak the truth.
Of course, Puritanism, with its emphasis on unredeemability for most of us smokers, perversely makes space for this admiration in which the unshriven manifest their lack of election by admiring Don Trump.
The problem here is that Bush, unlike Sen.McCain or Howard Dean, refreshing scoffers as they are, proclaims, literally, that he is saved. This is odd, because he seems to feel no need to manifest salvation by any form of charity.
The problem is that today, MOST Americans use each other and the world with a complete lack of common sense or compassion and are gradually descending, one and all, into a Moronic Inferno of psychic chaos. And, they vote.
Bush expresses that chaos in his very syntax and as such is the cynosure of the doomed.
UPDATE 2-2-2005
Thanks to the meta-reviewers for the perfect score. If the people who gave this review a *non placet* are Bush supporters then I am pitching a perfect game in a sense for I displease those who are pleased with lies, damned lies, and George Bush. Of course, to convince them to support my case would be better, and a home run, with the bases loaded, by contrast to the more austere and intellectual pleasures of the perfect game.
The lies continue. In yesterday' column, Paul Krugman shows how the set of arguments used to show that Social Security is "broken" are contradictory with respect to the collection of arguments used to show how it is that rubes, who take their money out of withholding and head for Vegas, will create a sky-high 6.5-7 percent return on equities during the same period of time...a rate of return seen only during the Internet bubble.
Of course, the attraction of such an argument is that in logic and in a sense, arguments with contradictory premises imply anything.
The lies are for many Americans a convenient total substitute for truth on which they feed for mere hope as does the California body builder on supplements alone. The whole shebang, the complete virtual reality, is headed for its next exogenous shock as a result.
Rating:
Summary: Good info, but very dry
Review: The information is good, and well presented, but as someone already mentioned, it really reads more like a laundry list instead of investigating the reasons behind what will one day be looked on as the most damaging presidential administration this country has ever (hopefully) survived. It isn't bad, just isn't really deep.
[...]
If anything, this poor slob's review actually gives more merit to this book than is probably due, based on the author's investigative style at least. I guess a lot of the laundry list of lies the author points out must really be on target though, to rile a conservative nutjob like the aforementioned reviewer, into such a defensive posture. Kudos to the list of lies and their acid effect of truth on supporters of those lies, but again, it could be better written.
Rating:
Summary: Overall a pretty good book
Review: Though I think the author overstates some things in the book, it is effective in showing a pattern of deception with George W. Bush that preceded his advent to the Whitehouse and characterizes his administration today.
What is most alarming about the book is the lesson that lying actually can work. With a propaganda machine of neocon pundits running interference for him, this President has taken more liberties with the truth than even Nixon.
One thing that would have greatly strengthened the book was the use of footnotes. I find it likely that the author has good sources for his statements, but the lack of footnotes severely weakens book as a means of clearly showing the lies told by George W. Bush.
Rating:
Summary: Where are the citations?
Review: I got this book hoping it would give me some ammo against my more conservative friends. I was hoping I could say "Look! Here's the proof!" Unfortunately all I got was "Look! Here's what David Corn says." In 320 pages, there is NOT ONE bibliographic citation. No end notes, no foot notes, no bibliography. I was already convinced that Bush is a liar (e.g. was the tax cut because the economy was booming or because it was going down the tubes?) but what I was looking for was proof. Corn provides great anecdotes and narratives but without the citations there is no proof. There is no way for me to see if Corn pulled something out of context in order to prove his point. If I were to say "David Corn's book shows that Bush lied about X, Y and Z" any conservative who has the talking points memorized would say "Of course Corn would say that! He's part of the _liberal_ media!" I have no way to back up what Corn says because he doesn't document his sources.
So I give him 5 stars for entertainment and "I knew it!" value, but I take 2 away for sloppy journalism.
Rating:
Summary: Tales of a serial liar
Review: The only thing wrong with this book is that there is no chance that more than a minuscule percentage of the electorate will read it, and most of them will be the already knowledgeable.
Journalist David Corn, who writes for The Nation and other publications in addition to having appeared on many TV and radio news shows, including NPR and Fox News, begins the book with the words, "George W. Bush is a liar. He has lied large and small. He has lied directly and by omission."
Corn obviously had to get that off his chest and out in the open since that is something he and all the other reporters who have followed the career of George W. know only too well; and yet it is something they have seldom felt free to say in so many words.
Corn recalls all the major Bush prevarications, from the weapons of mass destruction that weren't there, to the tax cuts that emptied the treasury for his buds, back to the 1990 Harken Energy (a kind of mini-Enron) insider trading scandal that saved George W. from what would have been another business failure. He was on the board of directors of Harken when he sold off his shares two months before the company's stock took a 20% nose dive after its losses became public. Bush denied trading on inside information. Because the SEC consisted of mostly friends of his father, George W. was given a clean bill of heath. Imagine what would have happened to him if his name had been, say, Martha Stewart.
In the final chapter, "Conclusion: How He Gets Away with It (So Far)" Corn attempts to explain why Bush's lies haven't hurt him. He blames the press for not having the gumption (maybe I should just say "guts") to contradict the president or to print the unvarnished truth themselves. Instead of a mealymouthed "Analysts Discount Attack by Iraq" (as in the Washington Post headline had it) or "CIA Warns That a US Attack May Ignite Terror" (as in the New York Times), Corn wonders why they didn't write, "CIA Suggests Bush Misleads Public on Threat from Iraq." Furthermore, before Bush was "elected" and was still campaigning, "Howell Raines, then the editorial page editor of the New York Times, ordered Paul Krugman...a harsh Bush critic, not to use the word 'lie' when assailing Bush's proposals."
Clearly the print media abdicated its responsibility to inform the public. In some cases the reporters refrained from asking hard questions and from writing candid stories because they were afraid they might not get their name called during the next presidential press conference, or because they were afraid of criticism that would come from Bush's supporter. But in other cases the direction to go easy on Bush came from higher management and ownership. The press, quite frankly, in a de facto sense was not, and is not, free. I think this is one of the big problems in this country today, and it is getting worse.
Even worse is the sad state of television news where the programs are under the watchful eyes of not only Rupert Murdoch types but also the sponsors of the programs who will not tolerate the president being called a liar. Even worse the news people not only quote Bush's lies, they broadcast him telling them as mini infomercials, often without a word of contradiction or warning that what you are hearing is not the truth.
The question arises, does Bush know he is lying? Maybe he does, but believes it's for a greater good. Or maybe, since no man sees himself as a scoundrel, his hypocrisy is so self-deceptive that he doesn't realize the extent of his mendacity. Corn speculates that Bush is "a binary thinker who views the world in black-and-white terms." (p. 320) Such people inevitably fall into self-deception because the world is not just black and white, and the truth is not, you're either for us or against us. Instead the truth varies according to circumstance and point of view, and there are many shades in-between.
By the way, another even more detailed and forceful book on this exact subject with an almost identical slant is The Book on Bush: How George W. (Mis)Leads America (2004) by Eric Alterman and Mark Green, which I also highly recommend.
Bottom line: a no-holds-barred look at the mendacious president, a two-faced master of deception and falsification who is doing Machiavelli proud. Our only hope is that the information in this book will somehow trickle down to the larger electorate, and the truth about George W. Bush will become common knowledge.
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