Edit of 10 November 2008 to lament the betrayal of John McCain.
The election is over. Obama fooled most of the people, and the Democrats out-frauded the Republicans with at least $300 million in illegal campaign contributions and double voting between New York and Florida and varied other states. McCain did himself in, allowing Bush staffers to destroy any attempt to address the substance of governance, and less the staffer that helped create the first speech by Governor Palin, Vice Presidential Operations was staffed by inept has-beens from spin-land, none of them with any deep knowledge about governance.
Sadly Obama, himself a talented individual, has been bought and paid for by Wall Street, and his transition team is totally committed to keeping the two party spoils system alive. He is, in short, a fraud. I am deleting fivce of the HOPE books below, and herewith provide five books that should give any citizen pause–Obama will be Cheney lite, seeking to pursue Abraham Lincoln's treasonous expansion of Executive powers with the active connivance of a treasonous Congress unfit to represent the United STATES of America.
Bernie's review is great and I have voted for it. I am going to stop buying formula books that combine a politician's name with a staffer's library browsing. I was especially distressed to not find the world “intelligence” or its commercial equivalent, decision-support. There is nothing wrong with the content, but as someone who writes and reads broadly about intelligence and decision support under conditions of ambiguity, this book could not hold my attention.
This is a rather unusual book, one that takes a clever approach of seeking to understand Bush Junior in the context of a Shakespearian tragedy, and specifically, Henry V.
Here are my flyleaf notes–this is a totally worthy book by a real professional with insight.
+ Three myths of the House of Bush:
– Made it on my own
– Not really rich
– Running for office to serve the Nation
+ Seven Lessons from the House of Bush
– Treachery of the press
– Importance of moment
– Money before politics
– Primacy of manners
– NE moderates an endangered species
– Don't give up
– Trust only the family
+ The author opens early with his conclusion that George Junior is a Walker (the differences are explained), not a Bush and the rest of the book is a lovely explanation of a family tragedy in three acts:
– ACT I: the loser struggling to be like Dad and failing
– ACT II: success at being different (drunk, boorish, inept, but different)
– ACT III: descent into mesianism (what happens when a village idiot gets the illusion of power)
+ Early on I have a note: national and global catastrophe rooted in a broken family whose black sheep got promoted more than one rung too far. It must gall the second fiddle that his own mother does not like him and thought the Presidency should have gone to Jeb.
+ Despite my extensive reading on the last eight years of high crimes and misdemeanors, this book contains information I have not seen before. The author hits the reader early on with:
– Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice were “enablers” for George Juniors' idiocy (Powell in my view confused loyalty with integrity)
– The second term flame-out was avoidable–Bush had good intentions but Rove held sway
+ The author addresses Bush's faith as false, non-theological, more like “self-help Methodism,” using Alcoholics Anonymous meetings instead of church as a group activity.
+ There is a superb discussion of the juxtaposition of Bush's linguistic blunders combined with the manner in which he was gifted at using evangelical and conservative code words.
+ There is fine coverage of George Juniors meanness and overbearing humiliating toward all, Rove in particular, who accepted every humiliation, including the nickname “Turd Blossom.”
+ The author summarizes the scandals on Rove's watch: Plume, Katrina, Iraq, firing of prosecutors (I would also add, subversion of Congress in violation of Article one, see Breach of Trust and also Broken Branch).
+ We learn in passing that Rove was abandoned three times:
– By his father who ran away
– By his stepfather who ran away (one of the two was homosexual, I forget which)
– By his mother who committed suicide
+ It was Rove, the author tells us, who pushed privatization of social security. As I review this book there are ads on the radio that seek to communicate that 40% of America's shares are owned by normal people. What they do not tell you, which you can lean in John Bogle's book, The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism, is that we are no longer an ownership society, we have abdicated to financial management intermediaries, and they have skimmed one fifth of the value off for themselves, a select few.
+ According to the author it was Rove and not George Junior that pressed for a strategy of demonizing terrorism. The author says Rove destroyed the Bush II presidency with the “catastrophic blunder of politicizing the War on Terror.”
+ When the author finally gets around to covering Dick Cheney he casts him perfectly as “Lord Chief Justice” from Henry V, the sycophant who revels in pulling the strings behind the scenes. I have the line, my own interpretation of the author's words, “played Bush like a fiddle.”
+ The author asserts that Cheney was not transformed, as Brent Scowcroft believes, but rather finally found an opportunity to exercise his own judgment about the irrelevance of Congress and the need for a unilateral Presidency autonomous from oversight and able to take bold initiatives without consultation. [See One Percent Doctrine for a review of Cheney's mal;feasance going back to the Ford Presidency, in ursurping Presidential power].
+ The author, editor in chief of Slate, observes that the press really missed this about Cheney, his intent focus on expanding Presidential power and dismissing Article 1 of the Constitution.
+ Addington receives concise but chilling coverage.
+ Pages 170-171 are a priceless summary of how Cheney
– Managed Bush's mind
– Framed choices
– Accelerated Bush's neurotic shoot from the hip uninformed decision making (while ensuring behind that Cheney's decision was preset or, if necessary, counter-manding the President behind his back after the fact, alleging to others not in a position to question, that President had changed his mind).
+ The author discovered in Lynn Cheney's “Executive Privilege” (evidently no longer carried by Amazon) a telling fictional tale all too real.
+ The section I found most interesting outlined the six phases of Bush Doctrine:
– 1.0 Unipolar Realism (we make reality in our own image)
– 2.0 With us or Against Us
– 3.0 Preemptive attack
– 4.0 Democracy in the Middle East
– 5.0 Freedom Everywhere
– 6.0 No doctrine at all
+ The author surprises me with one defense of Cheney that I consider credible: Cheney truly wanted to vaccinate the entire nation against smallpox because he truly believed the threat existed. I am reminded of Daniel Elsberg who in Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers recounts how he warned Henry Kissinger that reliance on Top Secret Codeword information would “make him like a moron, unable to listen to those who actually know.”
+ The author tells us that Bush II reads books many of them “but does not know how to think historically.” I am reminded of my youngest son, 12 years old, a brilliant wide receiver and first baseman, who at this point can read a book and not remember a thing from the plot.
+ The author ends with a devastating comparison of Winston Churchill, who did outgrow Lord Randolph and make his mark, and George Junior who “in the end, … failed to be his own man or displace his father.” Naturally there is the humiliating irony of proving that his father was right not to have gone on to Baghdad.
I just shake my head wondering how the American people have been so silent. Here are a few other books that round out the catastrophic decrepitude of the Bush-Cheney regime:
Some time a go I wrote a piece on 9/11, “who's to blame,” and it boiled down to this: We the People are to blame, for having dropped out of the democracy and abdicated our civic responsibilities. Cheney's high crimes and misdemeanors, not least of which was letting 9/11 happen as FDR let Pearl Harbor happen, Congress abdicating its Article 1 responsibilities, the mainstream media refusing $100,000 fully paid ads against the war; a piss-ant like Wolfowitz being able to get away with questioning Shinseki's experience, insight, and honor–all of these are secondary causes and I would hasten to include the “failure of generalship,” flag officer who, like Colin Powell, forgot their Oath of Office and confused loyalty with integrity. The prime cause is that we gave our government over to what I now consider to be four organized crime families: the Clintons, the Bushes, the Democratic Party, and the Republican Party.
As McCaffrey said on CNN last night (13 Feb 08), “anyone who votes for an incumbent in 2008 should lose their American citizenship.” Tongue in cheek? Perhaps. Relevant and actionable? Absolutely. It's time to abolish this government and start over.
So, to put it mildly, the book does a good job of exploring what it means to be a liberal or a conservative, and how that correlates with age, but it is not a sweeping nuanced view of all the alternatives.
On page 25 the author tells us that Liberals and Conservatives share:
+ Patriotism/Love of Country
+ Respect for the Law
+ Devotion to Family
+ Optimism/Faith in America
+ Prosperity/Economic Progress
+ Love Thy Neighbor
+ Tolerance
+ Civilian Control of the Military
+ Don't Tread on Me
+ Your Home Is Your Castle
+ Veneration of Education
+ Leisure
The author–and no doubt much of the books was written years ago–has been slow to see the rise of extremism on both sides, the dismissal of the law by Dick Cheney and Mike Hayden among others, and the general collapse of our society, now a The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead.
Although the book can be criticized for being “one man's view,” it is never-the-less to be admired for being offered to us, and I for one found parts of it helpful.
Early on the author has two columns that capture his view of where liberals and conservatives differ:
+ Government spending
+ Taxes
+Regulations
+ Welfare
+ Military spending
+ UN versus US leadership
+ Multilateral versus unilateral
+ Abortion versus pro-life
+ Marriage
+ Diversity
+ Protectionism versus Free Trade (no mention of fair trade)
+ Wages
+ Environment
+ Animal versus Human Rights
+ Church & State
+ Illegal Aliens
+ Social Justice versus Rugged Individualism
+ Treatment of Criminals
+ Capital punishment
+ Gun Control or not
+ Constituionality
+ Group versus Individual Rights
+ Broadening versus Preserving “American Culture”
The author then goes on to describe and evaluate at length.
This is an excellent book for a political philosophy course.
Disappointing, Revisionist, Misleading, Incomplete, January 21, 2008
Newt Gingrich
Edit of 13 Feb 08 to remove extraneous negatives.
Although Newt Gingrich is one of a handful of previously elected officials who has both a brain and an appreciation for history, this book is disappointing. It is primarily a base-pleasing blast on a variety of issues that are generally described with no implementation specifics, and certainly nothing in the way of an over-all balanced budget that would show what the trade-offs are.
2) Claiming that most of America is center-right and that the Democratic party now represents the fringe left places this author at the edge of delusion. Presumably he has read Running On Empty: How The Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It, but I question whether he has a clue about Liberty Coalition, Reuniting America, Cultural Creatives, World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility, Bioneers, or any of the other groups that in the aggregate represent over 150 million American voters who despise BOTH the Republican and Democratic parties and are–as Lou Dobbs urges–declaring Independence.
4) His specious recommendations on Iraq are completely inconsistent with reality as I have observed it across many many reviews. He fails to point out that the Chief of Staff of the Army, General Shinseki, correctly told Congress that 400,000 were needed to assure orderly stabilization & reconstruction, and that it was Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Cheney who over-ruled the Army and insisted on listening to a combination of Ahmed Chalabi (an Iranian agent of influence) and the Israeli government all too eager to have us do their dirty work. He natually avoids discussing the fact that we were snookered by Iran into doing what they could not do for themselves. Cf. A Pretext for War : 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies)
Now for the substance, such as it is:
1) Platitudes on steroids. This is a facile book that explodes a YouTube video into a 242-page double-spaced booklet (not counting the last third of the book, appendices).
2) There are no footnotes, endnotes, or bibliography. This is a massive Op-Ed that is totally disconnected from the need to take account of any larger reality.
3)He touches lightly on young people, education, the judiciary, privatizing social security, immgiration (never mind that he consistently failed as Speaker to funded urgently needed border patrol positions), and green conservatism. “National security” gets two double-spaced pages, other topics as many as four to six. Whoopee.
3) His approach to a balanced budget is disingenius as well as mis-directed. He chants the four mantras: 1) cut taxes; 2) increase spending on what I like, decrease it on everything else; 3) end pork barrel spending; and 4) smarter spending. He certainly has a point with respect to the idiocy of rewarding Lockheed Martin for consistently failing NASA, but the last time I looked, the President and Congress had an Office of Management and Budget and a Government Accountability Office, so this is pontifical. He has no serious observations on how to eliminate income taxes (introduce the Tobin tax on Federal reserve transactions); increase revenue (end the import-export pricing fraud, the crop insurance and other frauds, different corporate books for IRS versus stockholders, the list is long and he does not have it).
4) He calls for citizen leadership and more entrepreneurship without any reference to what has been going on for over a decade in the way of World Cafe, Nexus for Change, National Online Deliberation, Wisdom Councils, Wealth of Networks, etcetera.
The book asks three relevant questions and fails to answer them to my satisfaction as a broadly-read person who believes that transpartisanship, not bipartisanship, is the necessary solution:
1) Whom do we serve?
2) What do we value?
3) How do we measure achievement?
The book contains scattered impulses, some good (Hart-Rudman emphasized that the failure of US education, especially in mathematics and science, was a major threat to the future of the Republic), and some bad (several blatant overtures to evangelicals).
Enough.
By way of larger context for those who believe non-fiction can be useful:
Bush-Cheney, and Gingrich, ignore the first 8 threats as well as the last. The global war on terrorism is a fraud. What we *should* be doing is orchestrating a $250 billion a year program against the first seven threats, stop being the world's largest arms merchant, and start phasing out the 44 dictators, all but two our best pals (see Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025.
2) There are twelve policies that must be harmonized if we are to stabilize and reconstruct our own country:
01 Agriculture
02 Diplomacy
03 Economy
04 Education
05 Energy
06 Family
07 Health
08 Immigration
09 Justice
10 Security
11 Society
12 Water
3) Nothing the USA or EU in the next ten years will matter EXCEPT AND UNLESS they create an EarthGame, an Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, that compellingly demonstrates to the eight demographic challengers (Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and Wild Cards like the Congo) how they can avoid our mistakes.
Earth Intelligence Network is offering a free book online today that will be available on Amazon in late Feburary, “COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace.” Here is the bottom line: the age of top-down elite “management” of complex societies, using secrecy, scarcity, and fear to concentrate wealth and abuse the majority, is over. There is a broad literature on the emergence of bottom-up consensual citizen power including localized wisdom councils, and I have over 70 lists that can guide the earnest reader, but I will content myself for now with my last alloted link: The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All.
This book will, I hope, make money for the author. It will not, however, do anything for the Republic. Below I list seven REAL changes:
1) Electoral Reform Act (One-Page Outline at Earth Intelligence Network
2) Debates Open to ALL Parties, Not Just the Two Corrupt Parties
3) End Winner Take All in Both Cabinet and Congress
4) No Legislation Without Prior Public Posting in Detail
5) End Individual Income Taxes, Substitute Tobin Tax on Federal Reserve
6) End CEO Greed, Top Salary No More Than 1000X Lowest Salary
7) End Secrecy, Make All Government Decisions Transparent
To end on a positive note, I am quite certain that Speaker Gingrich would be a most valuable participant in any transpartisan cabinet that brought together leaders from across the spectrum. Our Nation needs more than platitudes–it needs a Transpartisan People's Trust that buys back the government; and an EarthGame in which each person has full access to all relevant information and we can self-govern in the context of the ten threats, twelve policies, and eight challengers. It does not help that we have lost an entire generation to lazy rote mediocrity in our schools.
The bottom line is that this book does not reflect the demonstrated breadth and depth of the Speaker's knowledge. It's a shallow quickie.
I bought four of Governor Huckabee's books, and spent much of Sunday going through them. I've decided to do one review posted four times, to provide anyone visiting one of the four books to see four snapshots in one place. I am NOT looking for multiple votes. This is my bottom-line over-all assessment of one of the three people I believe is qualified to b;ring our Nation together, the others being Senator Obama, and Representative Paul, who will not win but could demand electoral reform when Congress returns. The two formula books lose one star each but in no way does this discredit the substance within each.
1) This citizen is not going to let go of God or faith. He is completely different from Milt Romney, whom I consider to be just a little too slick about his Mormon loyalties (CIA officers who were Mormons would fall asleep at their desks because the Mormon church had them up working all night).
2) This is a sincere good man (I based this on seeing him elsewhere as well). I frankly think that he brings the right respect for faith and God, and we need some of that in the White House, not lies and treason documented in Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America. As an estranged moderate Republican and Methodist, outrages by the crimes committed in our name, I think its time we had a moderate faith in God back in the White House.
The latter book touches on various “mandate for change” issues, and one has to be somewhat dubious on his record, since more than one person from Arkansas has told me they lost income and the schools lost funding during his tenure.
We need change. I'd like to see Mike Huckabee lead a dialog with all congregations on God's Politics, the Left Hand of God, and Faith-Based Golden Rule morality in all our policies at all levels. Barack Obama is energizing the young, but still severely handicapped by his elderly advisors who are out of touch with global reality.
In my view, as a person who cares deeply about the Republic and has spent the last 15 years obsessing on global reality and a strategy for saving the Earth for seven generations and beyond, I would like to see Mike Huckabee being the evangelicals back into the fold, without the attendant lunacy and criminality that characterized the Bush-Cheney White House.
Please do not vote for this review in more than one place.
1998, the most earnest book (his first), January 5, 2008
January 5, 2008
Mike Huckabee
I bought four of Governor Huckabee's books, and spent much of Sunday going through them. I've decided to do one review posted four times, to provide anyone visiting one of the four books to see four snapshots in one place. I am NOT looking for multiple votes. This is my bottom-line over-all assessment of one of the three people I believe is qualified to b;ring our Nation together, the others being Senator Obama, and Representative Paul, who will not win but could demand electoral reform when Congress returns.
Both of the above are formula books, somewhat contrived, but earnest and sufficient to come to at least two conclusions:
1) This citizen is not going to let go of God or faith. He is completely different from Milt Romney, whom I consider to be just a little too slick about his Mormon loyalties (CIA officers who were Mormons would fall asleep at their desks because the Mormon church had them up working all night).
2) This is a sincere good man (I based this on seeing him elsewhere as well). I frankly think that he brings the right respect for faith and God, and we need some of that in the White House, not lies and treason documented in Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America. As an estranged moderate Republican and Methodist, outrages by the crimes committed in our name, I think its time we had a moderate faith in God back in the White House.
The latter book touches on various “mandate for change” issues, and one has to be somewhat dubious on his record, since more than one person from Arkansas has told me they lost income and the schools lost funding during his tenure.
We need change. I'd like to see Mike Huckabee lead a dialog with all congregations on God's Politics, the Left Hand of God, and Faith-Based Golden Rule morality in all our policies at all levels. Barack Obama is energizing the young, but still severely handicapped by his elderly advisors who are out of touch with global reality.
In my view, as a person who cares deeply about the Republic and has spent the last 15 years obsessing on global reality and a strategy for saving the Earth for seven generations and beyond, I would like to see Mike Huckabee being the evangelicals back into the fold, without the attendant lunacy and criminality that characterized the Bush-Cheney White House.
Please do not vote for this review in more than one place.
I bought four of Governor Huckabee's books, and spent much of Sunday going through them. I've decided to do one review posted four times, to provide anyone visiting one of the four books to see four snapshots in one place. I am NOT looking for multiple votes. This is my bottom-line over-all assessment of one of the three people I believe is qualified to b;ring our Nation together, the others being Senator Obama, and Representative Paul, who will not win but could demand electoral reform when Congress returns.
Both of the above are formula books, somewhat contrived, but earnest and sufficient to come to at least two conclusions:
1) This citizen is not going to let go of God or faith. He is completely different from Milt Romney, whom I consider to be just a little too slick about his Mormon loyalties (CIA officers who were Mormons would fall asleep at their desks because the Mormon church had them up working all night).
2) This is a sincere good man (I based this on seeing him elsewhere as well). I frankly think that he brings the right respect for faith and God, and we need some of that in the White House, not lies and treason documented in Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America. As an estranged moderate Republican and Methodist, outrages by the crimes committed in our name, I think its time we had a moderate faith in God back in the White House.
The latter book touches on various “mandate for change” issues, and one has to be somewhat dubious on his record, since more than one person from Arkansas has told me they lost income and the schools lost funding during his tenure.
We need change. I'd like to see Mike Huckabee lead a dialog with all congregations on God's Politics, the Left Hand of God, and Faith-Based Golden Rule morality in all our policies at all levels. Barack Obama is energizing the young, but still severely handicapped by his elderly advisors who are out of touch with global reality.
In my view, as a person who cares deeply about the Republic and has spent the last 15 years obsessing on global reality and a strategy for saving the Earth for seven generations and beyond, I would like to see Mike Huckabee being the evangelicals back into the fold, without the attendant lunacy and criminality that characterized the Bush-Cheney White House.
Please do not vote for this review in more than one place.
Formula Book with Limited Sources, March 6, 2008
