As a reminder, I'll be at the FireDogLake Book Salon today at 5:00 p.m. EST for a discussion of A Tragic Legacy, to be hosted and moderated by Digby. In anticipation of the Tuesday release date for the book, there will also be several excerpts published, beginning a little bit later today with an excerpt from the Iran chapter featured at Huffington Post. I will add the link when it is available.
One of the difficulties in selecting excerpts is that the argument in a book, at least in this book, is really indivisible, and any excerpt is necessarily incomplete. Several of the critiques of the book I've seen have been based on the Salon excerpt or, worse still, the title, and thus attribute to the book ideas which are really not quite accurate.
Nonetheless, there are several worthwhile posts about the book's argument -- including this one from the always astute Chris Floyd (and this response to Floyd's post from Paul Curtis). I don't agree with Floyd's argument, and it assumes that the book makes arguments which it does not actually make (though that is probably inevitable when excerpts of the book are published before the book is available), so I'll look forward to responding more substantively once Floyd is able to read the book.
Separately, this post by Cervantes makes some very insightful points regarding the debate over the authenticity of Bush's religiosity and the role it has played in his presidency. As Cervantes notes, "the point of Greenwald's book was never about Resident Bush's psychology, it was about political discourse" -- specifically the way in which the "Good versus Evil" framework corrupts our political discourse, justifies the unjustifiable, and ensures that we continue to ignore the issues which most urgently require examination.
Finally, several days ago, I was a guest on the radio show of Lawrence Velvel, the Dean of Massachusetts School of Law, regarding the Bush presidency, and specifically how Bush became the Republican nominee in 2000. For those interested, the discussion can be heard here.
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