(johnmac -- In his catalogue of pro and anti GWB books, Noah leaves out the most scathing polemic that I have seen, the book/pamphlet "Bush Lies In State" by Malachy McCourt (Sensi Publications, 2004, $9.95 ISBN 0-9755746-0-4). It is a very funny book but will offend any who hold their reverence for GWB too seriously)
>From the New York Times -- http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/12/books/review/12NOAHL.html?pagewanted=all For a lackadaisical reader, George W. Bush has been awfully good to the publishing industry. His father, George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41st president of the United States, was the subject of perhaps a half-dozen books during his time in office. George W. Bush, the 43rd president, is already the subject of more than 100. Bush fils inspires more book writing than Bush pere because he's a much more polarizing figure. ''I'm a uniter, not a divider,'' he said during the 2000 campaign, but his presidency has been marked by partisan warfare so bitter that by now the country is divided not so much by competing ideologies as by competing realities. Inhabitants of what we've learned to call the blue states, who live mainly on the coasts, see an entirely different Bush -- let's call him blue Bush -- from the red Bush perceived by those who live mainly in the country's middle and in the South. Swing voters don't, on the evidence, get book contracts. A ferociously blue Bush inhabits BUSH MUST GO: The Top Ten Reasons Why George Bush Doesn't Deserve a Second Term (Dutton, $21.95), by Bill Press, a commentator for MSNBC. Press's book is in the ''I'm mad as hell'' genre pioneered by conservatives but increasingly taken up by liberals. The structure is as formulaic as a villanelle. The title is exclamatory; each chapter outlines a specific beef and each ends with a crowd-pleasing refrain that includes the title of the book. So, here: ''For selling America off to the highest bidder . . . GEORGE BUSH MUST GO!'' Bush's gravest sin, in Press's view, was to wage war in Iraq under false pretenses. Bush went to the United Nations but was only pretending to care what it said. Bush said Iraq had chemical and biological weapons when it didn't. (Here I must blow my referee's whistle: Bill Clinton and Al Gore also believed Iraq had them, which reduces, though does not eliminate, Bush's culpability.) And so on. Domestically, Bush increased spending twice as fast as Clinton did, and pushed through two large tax cuts heavily weighted to the rich, thereby turning the budget surplus he inherited into a budget deficit projected to be more than $400 billion by the end of this year. But perhaps you've heard this before. Robert C. Byrd, who has served a half-century in Congress, worships at the altar of legislative tradition and is therefore the perfect foil for Bush, who is contemptuous of legislative oversight. In LOSING AMERICA: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency (Norton, $23.95), Senator Byrd sings the blues about the administration's use of the war on terrorism to justify various power grabs. ''In setting up large accounts to be spent without Congressional 'meddling,' '' Byrd complains, ''we have legislated a return of the slush fund.'' Byrd may be a droning Jeremiah, but he's right. This is a financial scandal waiting to happen. Worst of all, in Byrd's view, is that Bush seems to have at best a dim understanding of what he's up to. Byrd describes a meeting to discuss the creation of the Department of Homeland Security: ''It was obvious that he had no idea what was in his Department of Homeland Security proposal, nor did he seem to care.'' Even Ronald Reagan, Byrd recalls, took the trouble to read from 3 by 5 cards. Part of what makes Bush blue in the eyes of his critics is simple dislike, which John Powers, deputy editor of L.A. Weekly, expresses deftly in SORE WINNERS (And the Rest of Us) in George Bush's America (Doubleday, $24.95). Powers blames the Bush presidency for a string of cultural phenomena, from ''American Idol'' to the public boasting by Peter Olson, the chairman of Random House, about the many people he's fired. That sort of argument is almost impossible to sustain at book length, and Powers doesn't. But he does offer some artful gibes. Among them: Attorney General John Ashcroft is ''that oddest of creatures, a boring zealot.'' Epigrams like these give intellectuals like Powers a reputation for snideness, but bless me, Father. He made me laugh. Rotating our color wheel to red, Bill Sammon (Bush nickname: ''Superstretch'') is a senior White House correspondent for The Washington Times. His MISUNDERESTIMATED: The President Battles Terrorism, John Kerry, and the Bush Haters (ReganBooks/HarperCollins, $27.95) alternates fly-on-the-wall reportage with narrative reconstruction. In his United Nations speech, Sammon writes, Bush was trying to shame the international community into action. Predictably, though, the United Nations proved unshameable, necessitating action by the United States. That's right, necessitating. Iraq was in ''material breach'' of the resolution Secretary of State Colin Powell shepherded through the United Nations ''from the moment it went into effect.'' And what about Iraq's chemical and biological weapons cache? Their absence is a liberal concern -- grist for the Bush haters. Sammon's backhanded dismissal here is his most audacious gesture. But a close second is to quote, without comment, Karl Rove's assertion that the president likes to have his views challenged in freewheeling policy discussions. That, Rove explains, is why the White House must be so secretive: you can know that ''regardless of how it's resolved, everybody's gonna salute and move on.'' This is precisely as believable as the statement, ''Bill Clinton had eyes only for his wife,'' and runs entirely counter to even the testimony of the former speechwriter for the red team, David Frum, who observed, ''One seldom heard an unexpected thought in the Bush White House.'' Let's try again. Red Bush is impatient with the play of ideas because it's undisciplined, and Bush is all about discipline. You would be, too, if you believed that God, speaking in 1999 through the Rev. Mark Craig, had told you to run for president. David Aikman, a former senior correspondent at Time, shares this intelligence in A MAN OF FAITH: The Spiritual Journey of George W. Bush (W Publishing Group, $21.99). Red teamers will accept this at face value, or pretend to; blue teamers will react with alarm. Bush is further driven to discipline by his gut-level distaste for the informality and hedonism of the 1960's. If Bush is relaxing after hours in a sweater and needs to fetch something from the Oval Office, he will change into business attire, then change back out of it when he's done. Red teamers will think this is admirable; Blue teamers will think it's insane. Ronald Kessler, a veteran of Washington journalism and the author of books on the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the White House and the Kennedys, frames his red-team book, A MATTER OF CHARACTER: Inside the White House of George W. Bush (Sentinel, $24.95), almost entirely as a comparison between an Oscar Madison Clinton, whom he loathes, and a Felix Ungar Bush, whose ''competence in running the government was unparalleled.'' Kessler, apparently, likes his hospital corners tucked tight. The ultimate wellspring of Bush's discipline is his sobriety. Aikman thinks Bush's ''striking single act of self-discipline'' in quitting booze inspired him to seize firm control over his life. A more intriguing explanation can be found in THE BUSHES: Portrait of a Dynasty (Doubleday, $27.95), by Peter and Rochelle Schweizer. The Schweizers believe Bush has an addictive personality, and that his passion for discipline is itself an addiction: ''It was as if he had turned a character weakness into a source of strength.'' ''The Bushes'' is without question the winner in this batch of books that tell you what to think about Bush. Peter Schweizer is a fellow at the Hoover Institution, a red outpost, but he and his wife have provided the most layered and absorbing portrait of Bush in any of the volumes under review. Most of them note that during his senior year at Andover, Bush was the self-appointed commissioner of stickball. But only from the Schweizers did I learn that Bush named one of his teams the Stimson Steamers. ''Stimson'' was Henry L. Stimson, a secretary of war under Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, whom Bush's father and grandfather both revered. ''Steamers'' was -- well, let's just say it didn't refer to clams. The Schweizers also spell out, more explicitly than I've seen elsewhere, how Bush won his advantage in Republican fund-raising for the nomination. Bush pere, they write, discreetly asked large donors to hold off making contributions until Bush fils made his move. After he did, the former president and the rest of the Bush clan activated ''a nationwide network that included literally tens of thousands of family members, friends and supporters.'' According to Tom Rath, a Republican fund-raiser, ''The Bush family has done everything they could to shut off the oxygen supply to everyone else -- and it's worked.'' Conspiracy theorists take note: the father even ushered the son into a gathering of the Bohemian Grove in California, where the senior Bush was a member of the Hillbillies Camp. For all that, the Schweizers paint a sympathetic portrait. The lesson is that taking sides too hastily gets in the way of the quest to get the goods. Even a blue man like me -- you've surely figured that out by now -- will say amen to that. Timothy Noah writes the Chatterbox column for Slate. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. The 'johnmacsgroup' Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. 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