Frank Rich, the Greatest Story Ever Sold. Book Report

[Hamlette]

I started this book a couple of times and set it down. There are days when I just can't listen to all of this administrations failures but when I saw him on Maher last week (or was it Colbert or Stewart or some combination of those?) I started again.

Glad I did.

You might not want to read the rest of this post if you plan on reading the book. If you don't plan on reading the book, or just don't have the time (there is not enough time to read them all), here's a summary of a very important book (IMHO) I'll cross post on the General Discussion because there aren't many of us there and I thought more might be interested as this book answered two of the questions that have driven me crazy about the Iraq war: "Why did Bush invade and why didn't he fight to win?"

Rich sets out, in chronological order, each one of the administrations lies. For each lie he examines the evidence the admin knew (or should have known) proving the statements were known lies. He also tells us each place the media reported the truth (showing the lie) if reported at all (usually the 16th paragraph of a page 8 story with a headline that doesn't reveal the lie.)

He is very hard on the media for cheerleading this admin.

The end of the book is the best. The last half of the book he shows the "perfect storm" that resulted in Bush's approval ratings going down; Plamegate, Cindy Sheehan, and Katrina.

There are a few new things in the book but to most of us who frequent this site, not much, but he puts it all together. Sometimes the most surprising thing is the timeline ("that really happened the very next day" I'd think) and the crushing conclusions at the end.

In the last chapter he asks the question I've always wondered about: "So why did Bush invade Iraq?" I thought he was going to just offer the suggestions reasons we already know about: faulty intelligence, connections to 9/11, to spread democracy, to get rid of a dictator...nothing new. Then he uses the evidence to destroy all those reasons. And posits his own.

Bush invaded Iraq to win the 2002 midterm elections. His reasoning for reaching that conclusion are compelling. Rove has always wanted to establish a permanent GOP majority (control). That fighting terrorists as a police action does not capture the attention of the citizens since so much of it has to be done in secret. That the population was not freaked out scared anymore and Bush et al were slipping in the polls. We were also not getting scared enough by terror threats. It wasn't working enough anymore.

Polls showed that Americans did not support an invasion of Iraq in early 2002. So, how do you scare people AND change opinion about invading Iraq? Nukes, WMD, connections to 9/11. And, if you got people whipped up enough then told them: "only the GOP takes your security seriously" you can take back the Senate AND invade Iraq.

He lays out an air tight case for this as the reason for the invasion and why none of the other reasons make no sense using direct evidence by way of quotes from the parties ("don't roll out a new product in August" Card, "you don't use the military for nation building because there already is too much civilian interference with the military and that's wrong" Bush...not direct quotes, going by memory here. And much more.)

At least now I have an answer to two of my questions: Why did Bush invade and why did he never "fight to win" in Iraq?

Now the question is, can we prevent this in the future? If you think there will be a full "hearing" on this, it's a dream. It has not been that many years that we've been allowed to know/think that Tonkin Gulf was a lie. I hate to put that much faith in blogs but there is no doubt, a thinking person CAN get the truth online at the time its happening. Maybe that is our only hope now that the media has abandoned us.

He also mentions that nightly news reaches so many more people that it can help control the debate. Maybe we can/should pressure the media to report this stuff. It would help if it would take a good hard look at the part it played in this tragedy but I doubt many of them will since Rich is not kind to many of them (he does name names of the best and the worst.)

He also loves Stewart and mentions the show a few times.