This book is destined to enjoy a healthy shelf life for anyone ever needing a reference or citation to the dates, names and places for the Bush presidency’s many triumphs in marketing itself and the war in Iraq. Rich’s criticism of the legitimacy of those achievements is harsh, which will please the president’s critics.
He writes in his introduction that the book is “not intended to be a harangue” against Bush. But he provides ample fodder for anti-Bush haranguers and a steady supply of personal put-downs, like his claim that “the only really daring move in Bush’s entire adult life was to fire Bobby Valentine as manager of the Texas Rangers.”
The occasional ad hominem asides — referring to Bush as a “glad-handing salesman,” a “spoiled brat” and a “rich kid who used his father’s connections to escape Vietnam” — will delight the Bush haters among Rich’s fan base, but tend to undermine the often eloquent conclusions that he draws from his own raw material.
That’s too bad. The reader could more willingly go along with Rich’s conclusions that Bush has “lost the public” and “lost the war of ideas” in the struggle against radical Islam if Rich’s disdain for the president as a person were less obvious, and if he occasionally gave Bush credit for some of his initiatives.
Of all those he skewers for contributing to the “decline and fall of truth” in the selling of the war in Iraq, Rich goes easiest on the American people, writing that they had “a better excuse than the smart guys within the Beltway” because “Americans always love a good story.” He says that after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on American soil it was “not all that easy to resist” an administration willing to sell a scary story “with brilliant stagecraft and relentless pacing.”
Still, Rich ends his book by urging Americans to reject the pervasive culture of blurred lines between truth and fiction, or to risk being “exploited by another master manipulator from either political party.” If the public does not heed Rich’s warnings, perhaps the news media will answer his call for coverage that more aggressively separates fiction from reality as a step toward a more truthful civic life.
RSS