Excellent analysis of America under 7 years of the Bush Crime Family

books:


	• A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency Glenn Greenwald Three Rivers Press, 2008 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 63 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Sad and scary

Sad that one person can do so much harm, using a supposedly good premise - Christianity. And that people can't see the great harm religious fanaticism can do. Scary, because it is our president that has led us down this garden path.

Excellent analysis of America under 7 years of the Bush Crime Family

As usual, Greenwald is a font of facts and breaks down the criminal negligence and outright criminal activity of the Bush junta into terms that even the right wing cool-aid drinkers can understand. On the other hand I think he gives W too much credit in terms of explaining his behavior as a result of a rigid ideological thought process. A far more plausable explanation is that he is simply an emotionally stunted and pharmacologically impared dunce. Typical of a petulant seven year, old he is incapable of acknowleging mistakes and is for all practical purposes a functional sociopath.

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To vote intelligently you must read this book

If you want to know what happened, read Scott McClellan's book because he will tell you. If you want to UNDERSTAND what happened, read this book. It's hard going at first but stay with him. He makes the point that good vs. evil is not Bush's primary goal, it is his ONLY goal. The needs of American citizens are an annoyance to him because they cost money that might be better spent fighting "terror" wherever it might come up. The Katrina victims never penetrated his radar because there was nothing to be gained by saving them. Bush thinking goes, "all government protections should be abolished if they interfere with my agenda" and they pretty much do. The tunnel vision mindset as set forth in this book is the most frightening description of a presidency I have ever read.

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Interesting, but poorly written

Mr. Greenwald's book will leave you slack-jawed, even if you already have some idea of how poor a president George W. Bush has been. The best chapter, IMO, is Chapter 4, which talks about Bush's attitude and actions regarding Iran. My complaint is that Mr. Greenwald is not a very good writer, and he often repeats himself. He also overuses certain words, two examples of which in this book are "Manichean" and "overarching", which seemingly appear on every couple of pages. Other than that, it is a worthwhile read.

An interesting, if repetitive, polemic

Mr. Greenwald has introduced to the political lexicon a new word - "Manichean". I notice that even the main line press have taken it up. As far as I know, this is actually not correct usage; the Manichean heresy believed that the forces of Light and Dark, Good and Evil were in balance in the universe and the world, as opposed to the Christian belief that God was all-powerful and that his triumph is assured at a time and place of his choosing. Its most famous manifestation was found in the Cathars of the Languedoc in mediaeval southern France, annihilated in a Crusade of unparalleled ferocity. I'm sure that, as a Christian believer, Mr. Bush is not really Manichean.

What Mr.Greenwald really means is that Mr. Bush sees things in stark black and white, with himself as white. There are no subtle shades of grey. If you're not with him, you're against him. This is the view of the fanatic, be s/he religious or political. These are terrifying creatures, completely blind to reason and logic, determined only to force their view on others. In this, George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden are well-matched.

However, it is frankly terrifying that such a person can be President of the USA, the world's only superpower and possessor of its mightiest arsenal. It's like letting children with a box of matches loose in a fireworks factory. But then, the USA is a religious country, the official religion being the USA itself, a belief in its essential goodness and rightness and its destiny to spread this to other less enlightened places, whether they like it or not. Mr. Bush, a not very bright scion of East Coast privilege who got religion, has, in the aftermath of the 9/11 atrocity, used this official religion to take the USA down a perilous road to aggressive war on a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 and to threaten to go to war with another. Saddam Hussein was indeed a most unpleasant individual, but then so are many of the US's current allies. And by removing Saddam, the Arab world's counterweight to non-Arab, nearly 100% Shi'ite Iran, Bush strengthened Iran enormously and enriched it at the same time with high oil prices. Not bad going.

Mr. Greenwald makes his case in vast, indeed overwhelming, detail and he lays it on thick and fast. He makes it again and again - and again and again and again. Sometimes one feels like crying, "Enough! No more!" as example succeeds example, each more outrageous than the last. While this is all very well for committed Bush bashers, some of us would prefer a more measured discourse, such as, where does the US go from here? But of course Mr. Greenwald appears to be at heart a polemicist, a Democratic version of the Rush Limbaughs and Ann Coulters of the Republican side, but being somewhat of an improvement over their 100% fact-free vituperative ravings.

Can facts, measured debate and mature reasoning win in the USA against soundbites and rabble-rousing? I'd like to think so. As things currently stand, the USA represents the greatest danger to world peace on the planet. We can only hope that the US electorate comes to its senses in November and votes out the catastrophe called the Republican Party, and that the Party spends a long time in the wilderness recovering from its self-inflicted wounds and learning how to be sensible again. The tragedy of the Bush years is that the Republican Party has turned from a responsible party to a collection of assorted loonies. I wish it a speedy recovery, so that it can again become the party of that greatest of US Presidents, Abraham Lincoln.

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

The first true character study of a lost president and his disastrous legacy

In this fascinating, timely book, Glenn Greenwald examines the Bush presidency and its long-term effect on the nation, charting the rise and steep fall of the current administration, dissecting the rhetoric, and revealing the faulty ideals upon which George W. Bush built his policies. Enlightening and eye-opening, this is a powerful look at the man whose incapability and cowboy logic have left America at risk.

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