Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Book of the month

We already have a favorite prescient cartoon, now for our favorite prescient book. (See here for the latest developments. Has Fitz flipped Libby?)

Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush by John Dean.

For those who don't recall the name, John Dean was Nixon's White House counsel (not to be confused with Harriet Miers), who turned witness for the prosecution and pled guilty to obstruction of justice. It takes one to know one. You can't con a con man. Don't kid a kidder, etc., etc.

From the reviews:

John Dean goes further back, seeing in Bush all the secrecy and scandal of Dean's former boss, the notorious Richard Nixon. The difference, as the title of Dean's book indicates, is that Bush is a heck of a lot worse. While the book provides insightful snippets of the way Nixon used to do business, it offers them to shed light on the practices of Bush. In Dean's estimation, the secrecy with which Bush and Dick Cheney govern is not merely a preferred system of management but an obsessive strategy meant to conceal a deeply troubling agenda of corporate favoritism and a dramatic growth in unchecked power for the executive branch that put at risk the lives of American citizens, civil liberties, and the Constitution.

...For a convicted felon, John Dean is an exceptional author. I remember reading his own recollections of the Watergate affair and his own association with the subsequent events that led both to his own denouement and the resignation of Richard Nixon in disgrace in "Blind Ambition" in the mid 1970s. Once again he weighs in impressively by building a very strong circumstantial case for the investigation and possible prosecution of President George W. Bush for criminal actions that Dean terms to be indeed, "worst than those of Watergate". Culling from public records and the recollections of other eye-witnesses, Dean shows how Mr. Bush has systematically exaggerated, embellished, and engineered a series of preverifications and outright lies to the American public in an effort to convince us of the need for military intervention in Iraq.

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