NEW YORK: Bookstore display tables give the distinct impression there is a lot of lying going on in America these days, with President George W. Bush and his top advisers portrayed as the main culprits.
Bristling with indignation at the conservative Republican president and his policies, the books by liberal commentators include: “The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception” by David Corn, “Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth” by Joe Conason and “Bushwhacked” by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose.
And if readers can’t figure out who is lying about whom and about what in these books, they can turn to “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right” by acerbic political humourist Al Franken.
In various ways, these authors and others accuse Bush and his right-wing backers of telling big whoppers since winning the White House for the Republican Party almost three years ago by virtue of the razor-thin Florida vote.
Washington literary agent Jeff Kleinman, who said he receives one anti-Bush book “pitch” a week, said that in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, hijacked plane attacks on America, publishers tended to turn them down.
“Anything that was seen as anti-American was almost impossible to sell and I think the publishers’ feelings were reflecting the marketplace, that people were not going to buy,” Kleinman said.
But that has changed. Industry publications and best-seller lists show that some anti-Bush books are now selling well as the former Texas governor prepares to run for a second term in November 2004 and 10 Democrats vie for the challenger’s mantle.
KNIVES OUT: Liberal writers have unsheathed their sharpest pencils to accuse Bush of lying about the effects of his tax cuts, the impact of his policies on the environment and the justification for his declared ‘war on terror’. They also contend he distorted intelligence about Iraq’s purported weapons of mass destruction to wage war on Saddam Hussein.
“George W. Bush is a liar,” Corn, Washington editor of the left-wing news weekly The Nation, writes in his introduction. “He has lied large and small, directly and by omission. He has mugged the truth — not merely in honest error, but deliberately, consistently, and repeatedly.”
Corn, whose weekly’s October 13 cover depicts Bush with a long Pinocchio nose, concedes in his book that “a liar in the White House is not a remarkable development. Most presidents lie, many brazenly and with impunity.”
Books hammering Bush mirror best-seller lists of the 1990s that were crammed with books bashing President Bill Clinton, the Democrat who was impeached for perjury before a grand jury and obstruction of justice in the Monica Lewinsky affair.
New York Times columnist David Brooks said the partisan books on Clinton and Bush marked a shift in America to the “presidency wars” from “culture wars” of preceding decades.
“To the warrior, politics is no longer a clash of value systems, each of which is in some way valid. It’s not a competition between basically well-intentioned people who see the world differently,” Brooks said in a September 30 column. “It’s not even a conflict of interests. Instead, it’s the Florida post-election fight over and over, a brutal struggle for office in which each side believes the other is behaving despicably.”
STRONG SALES: John Baker, editorial director of industry newspaper Publishers Weekly, said Franken’s book and one by Princeton University economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman were selling “extraordinarily well.”
In “The Great Unravelling,” Krugman said Bush lied during his 2000 presidential campaign, lied once he took office, turned a record budget surplus into the biggest deficit to line the pockets of the rich and abused the public’s patriotism after the September 11 attacks.—Reuters