Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush.
Robert Parry, Sam Parry and Nat Parry
Arlington (Va.): The Media Consortium, 2007, US: $29.95 (h/b), $22.95 (p/b) (19)
The title of this book by Robert Parry and his sons doesn’t do the book justice. It’s much more than the title suggests (and also a wee bit less). More because we have a biography of Bush, to start with: his rise to political offices through a line of business failures – many of them involving what were essentially bribes in the guise of business finance – and his makeover from preppy, Yale nitwit to good ole boy, the shit-kicker from Texas. There are also substantial sketches of some of the key players in the Bush cabinets, the most brutal of which is the account of Colin Powell, whose career as ‘house nigger’ (my term, not the Parrys’), first for the Pentagon and then for the Bush regime, climaxed when he delivered the regime’s lies about Iraq’s weapons before the UN. Thirty years a soldier/bureaucrat, Powell is no fool and he delivered this speech after going over it all with the Director of the CIA, George Tenet; and he had Tenet stand right behind him – the symbolic co-author, literally covering his ass – as he delivered it.
A former journalist, Robert Parry, who I assume has done the bulk of the writing, has a nice plain, simple writing style and an eye for the telling detail which punctuates the who-what-when-where narrative. He notes on p. 228 that a UN arms inspector named Allison, said of the UN team’s reaction as it watched Powell’s UN performance:
‘Various people would laugh at various times because the information he was presenting was just, you know, didn’t mean anything, had no meaning.’
The conclusion of the inspectors after Powell’s speech was that ‘they have nothing’.
We have a little less than the title suggests because Parry’s focus is mostly on foreign policy and domestic politics rather than domestic policies, centrally the Republicans winning/stealing two presidential elections. (He knows they stole the first one and thinks they stole the second one but is unconvinced that it was done by computers, as has been suggested.) Through this runs his major sub theme: the sheer gutless, uselessness of the Democrats and the media in response to all this.
Parry – the Parrys – are very good indeed. If you’ve read Robert Parry before, then you know what to expect. If you haven’t, it’s time you did. It doesn’t get much better than this.
Notes
- Available from the usual places but if you buy it from the Parrys at <www.neckdeepbook.com/> they get more of the money to keep their excellent on-line service <www.Consortiumnews.com> going. I think the hardback cost me about $40 in the UK – about £20 at the current exchange rate.