Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Library Books

Yesterday was the groundbreaking on the George W. Bush Presidential Center at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.  There was much fanfare and self-congratulation among the honored guests. A gaunt, sickly-looking Dick Cheney contended that  "history is beginning to come around" on the Bush presidency.  Hardly.  A Rasmussen poll out yesterday found that 37% of likely voters view Bush as one of the worst presidents in history just slightly improved from the June mark of 40%.  Hopefully, articles like those by Walter Pincus in the Post (Bush Memoir Makes Selective Use of Iraq Data)and David Corn in Mother Jones (Bush Photoshops Rove Out of Plame Scandal) will continue to rebut the attempted rewrite of history. With Bush plunging a shovel into the dirt to kick off construction, I began thinking about what books should, but won't, be housed in the Bush Library.   Here's a start.  Feel free to add your own suggestions:
1.   U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights
2.   U.S. Constitution for Dummies
3.   The Complete Idiot's Guide to the U.S. Constitution
4.   Geneva Conventions
5.   Too Close to Call (The 36-Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election) by Jeffrey Toobin
6.   The Lies of George W. Bush by David Corn 
7.   Disarming Iraq by Hans Blix (former Director of UN Inspection Commission)
8.   Imperial Life in the Emerald City:  Inside Iraq's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran
9.   Fiasco:  The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas Ricks
10.  Worse Than Watergate by John Dean
11.  Fair Game: How a Top CIA Agent Was Betrayed by Her Own Government by Valerie Plame Wilson
12.  The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration by Jack Goldsmith
13.  Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib by Seymour Hersh
14. The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals  by Jane Mayer
15.  Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror by Mark Danner
16.  The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of the Truth in Bush's America by Frank Rich
17.  Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City by Jed Horne
18.  Angler:  The Cheney Vice Presidency by Barton Gellman
19.  United States v. George Bush et al. by Elizabeth de la Vega
20.  Reading Mastery - Level 2 Storybook 1 (includes The Pet Goat)

1 comments :

lonbud said...

It's probably easier to list the books that won't be in the Bush Library than it is to list those that will. Your Top 20 would make an excellent syllabus for a course called George W. Bush: The Most Disastrous Leader of the Modern Age.

As for Cheney (I'll think I'll buy 2011 calls on him in the Celebrity Death Index, btw), history is "beginning to come around" on the Bush presidency in exactly the same way that the insurgency in Iraq was in its "last throes" back in 2005.

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