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Serious Book Highly Recommended, July 1, 2008

Joe Bageant

Senator Obama may or may not have read this book. It's author does open with the observation that life is so hard among the white poor and working poor that they seek solace in beer, overeating, Jesus, and guns. This is, however, a very serious book, a first-hand deep look into the hearts and minds of the 60% of the country that cannot control its lifestyle, environment, pay check, or future.

Early on I note that the author appears to combine both education and common sense. There are magnificent turns of phrase throughout.

My fly-leaf notes:

+ Parallel world to that of the educated urban liberals
+ Life runs from complete insecurity to looming job insecurity
+ Just over half the poor in the US are white and this is the only group that is growing in number
+ For someone earning $8 an hour, if nothing goes wrong, they have $55 a week for groceries, gas, and incidentals
+ Insurance can cost as much as rent or mortgage
+ One third of working Americans make less than $9 an hour
+ They are inherently anti-union, facts are irrelevant, Christian radio is their primary source of information and viewpoint
+ This is a permanent underclass, two out of five have no high school diploma while all over 50 have major health issues, and low to no credit
+ The leftist middle class does not realize that this group votes right in part out of a feeling of revenge
+ Right owns the bars, the non-Internet real world
+ Left lost the middle when they demonized guns and gun owners–70 million gun owners, 200 million guns, guns are used to protect 60 times more often than they are used to attack
+ Superb multi-page discussion of whitetrashonomics and the trailer mortgage scams
+ Fundamentalists are superbly organized, home schooling leads to select colleges where political indoctrination is part of the deal
+ Sense of Rapture and Left Behind is very real within this group
+ Excellent discussion of how health “non-profits” are a real-estate valuation scam that serve only the well-off and not the poor
+ Television and petroleum have defined us

The author makes it a point to quote and point to a dirty dozen books that he drew on, but overall this is an essay from the heart with a great deal of intellect and a great deal of discipline in the presentation.

I highly recommend this book to both moderate Republicans wondering where their Party went off the rails, and to moderate leftists and to libertarians wondering how best to reconnect to what appears to be a very angry, down-trodden, unheard and unseen majority.

The most compelling insight for me from the author centered on his description of small towns across America, but especially in the South including Virginia, where a network of “elites” controlled the bank, newspaper, city hall, zoning board, and so on. As the author describes it, these fiefdoms and their masters are all too eager to cut deals with corporations and make money off the resulting land transactions, while not spending money on education, localized health care, or anything that might elevate the “local poor” to a point where they might understand the value of unions or tenant boards.

I experienced one major personal insight in reading this: the author takes great care to point out that most members of this group do not read, period. No books, no newspapers, barely use the Internet (except for NASCAR) and–this is the insight–have great disdain for those of us who have the “luxury” of sitting around and reading (not real work, that). This book and this author really communicated to me how little value my education and reading has in this context–what is needed is a long-term hands-on strategy for educating all the people all the time, and that is something neither the Democrats nor the Republicans appear willing to fight for, which is sad, since Thomas Jefferson said so clearly that a Nation's best defense is an educated citizenry.

Other books I recommend (and have reviewed):
The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It Will Take to Win It Back

The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism
The Working Poor: Invisible in America
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor
Left Hand of God, The: Healing America's Political and Spiritual Crisis
Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
The Manufacture Of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System

DVD (links poverty and military recruitment):
Why We Fight

AA Mind the Gap — Vote and/or Comment on Review

2008/04/222011/10/22

Review DVD: American Drug War: The Last White Hope

5 Star, Atrocities & Genocide, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Government), Crime (Organized, Transnational), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Reviews (DVD Only), Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

This is a very serious movie and I volunteered to appear in it, April 22, 2008

Tommy Chong

I must disclose that I came into this movie at the very end when the brilliant producer realized I could provide a few bits that would bring it all together. I volunteered my time because I felt then–and I feel now–that this film was totally righteous. So I am listed as one of the “actors” but unlike some of them for whom file clips were used, I was taped speaking about this specific situation for this specific movie.

Our government is BROKEN. The civil servants and uniformed personnel are good people trapped in a bad system–a cesspool. Standing above them, hoarding the wealth, the power, and the personal privilege, are “elected” officials and their appointed cronies that have no business at all governing this great nation. They are inept and should be dismissed. We need a Constitutional Convention, an end to the Elctoral College, and deep Electoral, Financial, and National Security Reforms.

I have tagged this DVD with the word treason, because that is what CIA, DEA, the FBI, and the White House are guilty of when they protect drug wholesalers and allow entire neighborhoods to go down the crack drain, not because of Ricky Ross, but because of high crimes and misdemeanors all the way up the chain above him.

In my world, accountability is supposed to start and be enforced from the top down, not the bottom up. I hold John Deutch and later George Tenet accountable for failing to manage all five of the CIAs (the Wall Street CIA, the White House CIA, the front CIA, the paramilitary CIA, and the sodomy Safari Club CIA). I can only imagine the counterparts in DEA and the FBI and other elements of the government with the power to commit treason and get away with it while making a personal profit from the power We the People have assigned to them.

2008/03/212010/01/05

Review: Daydream Believers–How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power

5 Star, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Diplomacy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Insurgency & Revolution, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Iraq, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Religion & Politics of Religion, War & Face of Battle

Together with a Few Other Books, All You Need to Know, March 21, 2008

Fred Kaplan

The author is kinder to the protagonists than they merit.

I give the author high marks for making the case early on in the book that the world did NOT change after 9-11, and that what really happened was that the coincidence of neo-conservative back-stabbing and Bush's well-intentioned evangelical village idiot view of freedom and democracy.

The author does a fine job of reviewing how after 9-11 we were faced with two choices, the first, going for empire (“we make our own reality”) or revitalizing alliances. The neocons in their ignorance called for regime changes, but the author fails us here by not understanding that both political parties love 42 of the 44 dictators, those that “our” dictators.

The author has many gifted turns of phrase. One talks about how their “vision” turned into a “dream” that then met “reality” and was instantly converted into a “nightmare.”

The author adds to our knowledge of how Rumsfeld empowered Andy Marshall, and how the inner circle quickly grew enamored of the delusion that they could achieve total situational awareness with total accuracy in a system of systems no intelligent person would ever believe in.

The author highlights two major intelligence failures that contributed to the policy bubble:

1. Soviet Union was way behind the US during the Cold War, not ahead.
2. Soviet economy was vastly worse and more vulnerable that CIA ever understood.

The author helps us understand that the 1989 collapse of the Berlin War created a furor over the “peace dividend” and the “end of history” that were mistaken, but sufficient to bury with noise any concerns about Bin Laden and Saudi Arabian spread of virulent anti-Shi'ite Wahabibism from 1988 onwards.

By 1997 Marshall and Andy Krepinevich were staking everything on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), high speed communications and computing (still not real today), and precision munitions.

The author provides a super discussion of Col John Warden's “five rings” in priority order: 1) leadership and C4I; 2) infrastructure; 3) transportation; 4) population (again, war crimes); and finally, 5) the enemy. The author is brutal in scoring the campaign designed by Col Warden a complete failure. It…did…not…work (in Gulf I).

I cannot summarize everything, so a few highlights:

+ Taliban quickly learned how to defeat US overhead (satellite) surveillance–remember, we do not do “no-notice” air breather imagery any more, except for easily detected UAVs, with mud as well as cover and concealment. .

+ Excellent account of the influence on Rumsfeld of George Tenet's failure to satisfy him during a missile defense review. It became obvious to all that the U.S. Intelligence Community a) no longer had a very high level of technical mastery on the topic; and b) was so fragmented as to make the varied analytic elements deaf, dumb, and blind–not sharing with each other, using contradictory data sets, the list goes on.

Page 187 is the page to read if you are just browsing in the bookstore:

Summarizing 2007: “Not so much a return to realism as a retreat to randomness.” Also: “Grand vision was shattered by reality. Policies were devised piecemeal; actions were scattershot, aimless.” And: “put forth ideas without strategies; policies without process; wishes without means.” Devastating.

So many other notes. Here are a tiny handful:

+ Speechwriter Michael Gersen connected with Bush on an evangelical level, wrote major speeches, in the case of a foreign policy speech, without actually consulting any adult practitioners.

+ Joseph Korbel was both Madeline Albright's father and Condi Rice's educational mentor–talk about a non-partisan losing streak!

+ American Enterprise Institute and Richard Perl used Natan (Anatoly) Sharansky to impress Cheney and subvert Bush by reframing the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians as the first 21st Century war between terrorism (the hapless Palestinians) and democracy (the Israeli's).

+ He credits Eliot Abrams with devising the unique linkage between American Jews whose numbers and influence have been declining, and the Evangelical Christians whose influence peaked with Bush-Cheney.

+ He slams General Tommy Franks for providing assurances and making promises he could not keep with respect to settling and stabilizing the towns by-passed or over-run by the US Army.

+ The author is misleading in his account of the Saudi-Powell discussions on how an election would lead to radical Islamics in charge (as opposed to despotic, perverted spendthrifts).

+ Rumsfeld Lite going into Iraq meant that a quarter million tons of ordnance was looted by insurgents, which is what cost us four years time. General Shinseki is vindicated.

+ For the first time I learn of a planned Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

+ The author introduces Ahmed Chalabi but does not fully understand this man's crimes as well as his special relationship with Iran. Iran used him to get the USA to depose the Taliban and Sadaam Hussein, , and to lure the entire US military into a quagmire.

+ Department of State, Mr. White in particular, got it right every time.

+ Legitimacy and stability must come before elections.

+ Hezbollah win in Lebanon dealt a crushing blow to the Bush delusions.

+ Bush refused to deal with Syria and Iran throughout. I am reminded of how Civil Affairs was told in the first five years of the war to blow off the tribal leaders and imams, and only now are they being allowed to get it right.

+ Useful account of three failed Public Diplomacy tenures (Charlotte Beers, Margaret Tutwiler, Karen Hughes (who waited six months so her son could leave for college–so much for the importance of that job….)

+ USA sent $230 million in aid to Lebanon, while Iran poured in $1 billion via Hezbollah (meanwhile, the Chinese do the same everywhere else).

Page 191 is glorious: Bush's strategies were “based on fantasies, faith, and a willful indifference toward those affected by their consequences.”

Page 192: the real divide is “between the realists and the fantasists.”

The author quite properly slams the Democrats for not having an original idea, plan, program, bill, budget, or moral thought.

He ends by suggesting that multinational consensus is still the true litmus test for the sensibility and sustainability of any endeavor.

On this note, I conclude that five stars are right where this book should be. Incomplete, but original and provocative. Bravo.

Other recommendations:
Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025
Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
DVD Why We Fight
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
The Price of Loyalty : George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy

2008/03/152018/07/12

Review: The Three Trillion Dollar War–The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict

6 Star Top 10%, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Economics, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Iraq, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Priorities, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, War & Face of Battle

March 15, 2008

Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes

This is one of those very rare endeavors that is a tour d'force on multiple fronts, and easy to read and understand to boot.

It is a down-to-earth, capably documented indictment of the Bush-Cheney Administration's malicious or delusional–take your pick–march to war on false premises.

As a policy “speaking truth to power” book; as an economic treatise, as an academic contribution to the public debate, and as a civic duty, this book is extraordinary.

Highlights that sparked my enthusiasm:

1) Does what no one else has done, properly calculates and projects the core cost of war–and the core neglect of the Bush-Cheney Administration in justifying, excusing, and concealing the true cost of war: it fully examines the costs of caring for returning veterans (which some may recall, return at a rate of 16 to 1 instead of the older 6 to 1 ratio of surviving wounded to dead on the battlefield).

2) Opens with a superb concise overview of the trade-off costs–what the cost of war could have bought in terms of education, infrastructure, housing, waging peace, etcetera. I am particularly taken with the authors' observation that the cost of 10 days of this war, $5 billion, is what we give to the entire continent of Africa in a year of assistance.

3) Fully examines how costs exploded–personnel costs, fuel costs, and costs of replacing equipment. The authors do NOT address two important factors:

+ Military Construction under this Administration has boomed. Every Command and base has received scores of new buildings, a complete face lift, EXCEPT for the WWII-era huts where those on the way to Iraq and Afghanistan are made to suffer for three months before they actually go to war.

+ The Services chose not to sacrifice ANY of their big programs, and this is a major reason why the cost of the war is off the charts–we are paying for BOTH three wars (AF, IQ, GWOT) AND the “business as usual” military acquisition program which is so totally broken that it is virtually impossible to “buy a ship” with any degree of economy or efficiency.

4) The authors excel at illuminating the faulty accounting, the subversion of the budget process, and they offer ten steps to correction that I will not list here, but are alone worth the price of the book. What they do not tell us is:

+ Congress rolled over and played dead, abdicating its Article 1 responsibilities–the Republicans as footsoldiers, the Democrats as doormats.

+ The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has not done the “M” since the 1970's and is largely worthless today as a “trade-off manager” for the President.

5) I am blown away by the clear manner in which the authors' show the skyrocketing true cost up from a sliver of the “original estimate” out to a previously unimaginable 2.7 trillion (cost to US only, not rest of world). The interest cost in particular is mind-boggling.

6) They note that the costs the government does NOT pay include:

+ Loss of life and work potential for the private sector
+ Cost of seriously injured to society
+ Mental health costs and consequences
+ Quality of life impairment (I weep for the multiple amputees)
+ Family costs
+ Social costs
+ Homefront National Guard shortfalls needed for Katrina etc.

7) The authors go on to discuss the costs to other countries and to the globe, beginning with the refugees and the Iraqi economy. They do NOT mention what all US Army officers know, which is that Saddam Hussein ordered all the nuclear and chemical materials dumped into the river, and the mutations, deaths, and lost agricultural productivity downstream have yet to be calculated.

8) They touch on three delusions that John McCain and others use to demand that we “stay the course” and this also merits purchase of the book. I was in Viet-Nam from 1963-1967, and I well remember exactly the same baloney being put forth then. We ought to apologize to the Iraqi people, and instead of occupying the place, give them the billions they need to restructure after our devastating occupation.

They conclude the book with 18 recommended reforms, each very wise, and these I will list–the amplification provided by the authors in the book is stellar.

1. Wars should not be funded through “emergency” supplementals.
2. War funding should be linked to strategy reviews (and guys like Shinseki should kick morons like Wolfowitz down the steps of Capitol Hill when they contradict real experts and lie to Congress and the public)
3. Executive should create a comprehensive set of military accounts that include all Cabinet agency expenditures linked to any given war.
4. DoD should be required to present clean, auditable financial statements to Congress, for which SecDef and the CFO should be accountable (let us not forget that Rumsfeld was being grilled on the Hill on 10 September about the missing $2.3 trillion, and the missile that hit the Pentagon rather conveniently destroyed the computers containing the needed accounting information)
5. Executive and CBO should provide regular estimates of the micro- and macroeconomic costs of a military engagement (over time).
6. [simplified] Congress must be notified by any information controls that undermine the normal bureaucratic checks and balances on the flow of information.
7. [simplified] Congress should reduce [or forbid] reliance on contractors in wartime, and explicitly not allow their use for “security services, while ensuring all hidden costs (e.g. government insurance) are fully disclosed.
8. Neither the Guard nor the Reserve should be allowed to be used for more than one year unless it can be demonstrated the size of the active force cannot be increased.
9. [simplified] Current taxpayers should pay the cost of any war in their lifetime via a war surtax [rather than imposing debt on future generations]

These next reforms address the care of returning veterans:

10. Shift burden of proof for eligibility from veterans to government
11. Veteran's health care should be an entitlement, not for adjudication
12. Veteran's Benefit Trust Fund should be set up and “locked”
13. Guard and Reserve fighting overseas should be eligible for all applicable active duty entitlements commensurate with their active duty.
14. New office of advocacy should be established to represent veterans
15. Simplify the disability benefits claims process.
16. Restore medical benefits to Priority Group 8 (400,000 left out in the cold)
17. Harmonize the transition from military to veteran status so that it is truly seamless
18. Increase education benefits for veterans.

I put this book down totally impressed. Completely irrespective of one's political persuasion, strategic sagacity, or fiscal views, this book is a tri-fecta–a perfect objective combination of wise policy, sound economics, and moral civic representation.

BRAVO!

I also recommend:
DVD Why We Fight
DVD The Fog of War: Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
Wilson's Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing, and Catastrophe in the 21st Century
A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility–Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin
Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush

Afterthought: David Walker, Comptroller General, has resigned from his 15-year appointment after failing to find adult attention within Congress when he briefed them this summer to the effect that the USA is “insolvent.” His word. Our government is broken beyond anyone's wildest imagination. [Note: Mr. Walker is now running the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, with the objective of providing to the public the factual budget information that Congress is ignoring, concealing, or manipulating. As Mr. Walker says, the public is now ahead of the politicians in its understanding, and all that remains is to flush all the incumbents down the toilet in 2008.

2008/03/042010/01/05

Review: Economic Governance in the Age of Globalization

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Corruption, Economics

More Relevant Than Ever, Great Addition to the Literature, March 4, 2008

William K. Tabb

Although this book was published in 2004, I did not notice it until recently, and I must say, I find it more relevant than ever today, in 2008. It could have lost a star for not being sufficiently visionary or for not offering a specific implementable plan for overturning the broken global economic governance regimes that it so brilliantly dissects, but out of respect for the author's superior scholarship and my own limitations, I must go with five stars.

Indeed, I am astonished to not see another review. The author deserves reading and recognition.

Here are a few of my flyleaf notes:

+ Superb detailed examination of how the so-called global economic governance organizations are the last gasp of the pyramidal pathologies, lacking in democratic public dialog or deliberation.

+ author struck me as overly generous to the USA but he clearly points out the need to understand and respect the detailed reaons why others do not agree with US “designs” and the US insistence on treating each country alone, rather than in a regional context.

+ I was taken with the author's concise focus on the dangerous combinations of US subsidies, excessive borrowing (this was before the subprime mortage and credit crisis we are now experiencing).

+ Switzerland has reformed SLIGHTLY and is still the banker of choice for dictators and corrupt despots who are looting their countries, creating failed states and perpetual poverty. I have a side note: “time to invade Switzerland and demand open banking?”

+ The author points out that free flowing investment and rules against expropriation are diametrically opposed to sovereign governance and any attempt to provide for sustained development and financial stability.

+ Global institutions too easily manipuated by developed nations.

+ QUOTE pages 373-374: “The excess capacity visible on a global scale, downward pressure on prices, the threat of deflation, and the impact of desperate countries seeking to compete by ignoring labor rights and environmental concerns produce a shallow and uneven development.

I put this book down with considerable humility–like John McCain, economic (and methematics) are my weak zone. I did learn enough from this book to realize that this author is gifted and should be listened to and given an opportunity, along with C. K. Prahalad and Jeff Sachs and Paul Krugman, to restore the social aspects of political economy.

Other books that strike me as complementary to this one:
The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks)
The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It
Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism
The leadership of civilization building: Administrative and civilization theory, symbolic dialogue, and citizen skills for the 21st century
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, Updated Edition
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

Afterthought: the index is *very* disappointing (publisher's fault) but the bibliography by the author is itself another book and quite fascinating and comprehensive.

2008/02/132009/10/30

Review: Pagan Christianity?: Exploring the Roots of Our Church Practices

5 Star, Corruption, Religion & Politics of Religion

Smashes the False Foundations of Didactic Churches, February 13, 2008

Frank Viola

Didactic means “one way” and is a word used by scholars to describe conferences where there will be lectures instead of round tables. Generally they are sterile and annoying. Most churches today are like that, one-way, everyone sitting like rote students, a false sense of community that eschews integral consciousness.

This book joins The Complete Conversations with God (Boxed Set) as an extremely important work. I concluded long ago that the Catholic Church was a form of legalized organized crime picking the pockets of the many for the advantage of the few, and that certainly applies to most fundamentalist movements in the US, where “carpetbagger” is the first term I think of, followed by “cult” and “hypocrit.”

I really respect David Flower's review and his list of books, all unknown to me. Here I will list several others: the first two support this book's contention, the others touch on the good and the bad of religion and politics in the USA.

101 Myths of the Bible
Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (Plus)

See also, books I admire about faith done right and done wrong:

God's Politics LP
The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right

Dogs of God: Columbus, the Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors
Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction
American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America

This is a very valuable book. See also, shortly, my review of Carl Sagen's The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

2008/02/132018/07/21

Review: The Bush Tragedy

5 Star, Biography & Memoirs, Corruption, Crime (Government), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Politics

Unique, in a class of its own

February 13, 2008

Jacob Weisberg

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.

+ The author reminds us that Cheney went from intern to Chief of Staff of the White House in 6 years, and I cannot help wondering what pathologies came from too much power too soon (see The Pathology of Power – A Challenge to Human Freedom and Safety)

+ 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:

Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq
Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders
Running On Empty: How The Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
A Pretext for War : 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies
Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency

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.

Category: Corruption

Review: Deer Hunting with Jesus–Dispatches from America’s Class War