Bush’s Book

We knew that George Bush’s book, which should be entitled “America’s First Retarded President” would be self-serving, shallow and dishonest to the core.  Even I, although I hate the fake Texan with a deep, visceral hatred, did not think it would actually be plagiarized.

There’s no need for that.  He was president for 8 years, won two disputed elections, traveled around the world, met world leaders as well as other celebrities and was directly involved in some of the biggest disasters to strike the world since WWII.  Good lord, how hard could it be to make a book out of that?

Certainly it was ghostwritten.  Although they claim that it wasn’t, there is credit given for a “researcher” and other assistants.  So, how hard could it have been for these guys to sit down with Bush, ask him questions like “Where were you on September 12th, 2001?,” “What were you thinking when you reached down to give Angela Merkel a back rub?,” “Why did it REALLY take so long to respond to the Katrina disaster?” “Did you ever pork Karl Rove up the butt?,” and “Were you hammered at the Beijing Olympics because it sure looks like you were in those photos?” string together his answers, edit out any incriminating bits, add a little background material and Bob’s Your Uncle,

Is That The Look of a Sober Man? Bush at Beijing Olympics

you’ve got an 800 page stemwinder.

But noooo, that would have been too much work.  Instead, they lifted whole passages, damned near verbatim, out of memoirs which had already been written by other members of the administration.  In one case, they had Bush commenting on a meeting with Afghan president Karzai, at which Bush was not present.  (more details at http://www.huffingtonpost.com)

So the book  is even unethical by writers’ standards, and writers’ standards are pretty damned lax.

There is one interesting thing about the book, though.  In it, Bush proudly admits to authorizing waterboarding.  Waterboarding is torture.  That’s against the Geneva Convention.  That’s a war crime.  George W. Bush, former president of the United States, has confessed in writing to war crimes.  It’s not likely that he’s going to be prosecuted, but it does mean that historians will read this 100 years from now and even 1,000 years from now and ask the question:  Why the hell wasn’t he?