The Selling of the President

books:

	• The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush's America Frank Rich Penguin (Non-Classics), 2007 - 352 pages average customer review:based on 150 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The Selling of the President

Throughout the Bush admnistration, Frank Rich's column for the New York Times was a place to go for insightful, behind the curtain, analysis of just what this President was attempting to do.

Rich's background as a theater critic actually left him better prepared to comment on this particular President than most of the mainstream media, who for the most part behaved as expected by Karl Rove.

It is a measure of the thoroughness with which the Bush gang wrecked the joint that his devastating effect on the economy is rarely mentioned, although those consequences did not truely "hit the fan" until after the book was written.

The book does make a comprehensive case against the Administration's dishonesty in sending the nation off to war, and also touches on the government's inept performance with Katrina.

Regardless of one's view of Rich's commentary, and he does get a little snarky, it is clearly a solid, well researched piece of reportage. I strongly suspect the numerous one and two star reviews here are politically motivated.

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An Awesome Read

Frank Rich gives a great overview of the Bush Administration. He spends lots of time looking at what influenced the Administration and what pre-9/11 war plans his administration had.

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outstanding

i found frank rich's book, "the greatest story ever sold" to be captivating reading. rich details the arguments used in justifying the war in iraq and he discusses some of the marketing techniques, some of the abuses of intelligence, and some of the political blunders. overall, an excellent read. i give it an A- and i highly recommend it for anyone with an interest in how we got into iraq in the first place.

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Half of the story

I found this a useful book - as far as it goes - which is not very far.

Rich gives an interesting blow by blow account of the media sales spin applied to the WMD and Iraq/Al Qaeda lies used by the American government to justify its invasion of Iraq.

What he leaves to a much smaller section in the epilogue is the obvious question, " ... what really did trigger the war in Iraq?"

His answer, is that in 1992, what were to become the neocons "...conceived a controversial manifesto preaching the importance of asserting unilateral American military power after the cold war. Well before the next Bush took office, these and other neocons fated to join his camp had become fixated on Iraq, though for reasons having much to do with their own ideas about exerting American force to jump-start a realignment of the Middle East and little or nothing to do with the stateless terrorism of Al Qaeda or with nation building." and he essentially leaves it at that.

I found a detailed explanation of the missing part of the story in Sniegoski's, "The Transparent Cabal". He shows how hard line Likudnik Jews in the Bush administration and the American Enterprise Institute, JINSA (Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs) and CSP (Centre for Security Policy) successfully hijacked American foreign policy at a critical point in history.

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Secretary of State Powell's chief of staff and was well aware of Feith's Israel orientation, stated in regard to him and his neocon associate David Wurmser:
"A lot of these guys, including Wurmser, I looked at as card-carrying members of the Likud party, as I did with Feith. You wouldn't open their wallet and find a card, but often I wondered if their primary allegiance was to their own country or to Israel. That was the thing that troubled me, because there was so much they said and did that looked like it was more reflective of Isreal's interest than our own."

In this unbalanced book, Rich doesn't look at the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan (Israel related) wars but to date (January 2010) they have cost the American taxpayer $ 950.322.000.000 and about 4.500 dead. The Iraqi figure is about 151.000 completely unneccessary fatalities and a wrecked country.

Altogether a shameful story half told.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

When America was attacked on 9/11, its citizens almost unanimously rallied behind its new, untested president as he went to war. What they didn't know at the time was that the Bush administration's highest priority would be to consolidate its own power at any cost. As only he can, New York Times columnist Frank Rich brilliantly and meticulously illuminates the White House's disturbing love affair with "truthiness." His step-by-step chronicle shows how the nation was misled into war in Iraq and how the bungled aftermath, a Washington leak, and a devastating hurricane at long last revealed the lies in a story that had been so effectively sold to the nation as God-given patriotic fact.

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