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The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush's America | 
| Author: Frank Rich
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  144 reviews
Sales Rank: 16534
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Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.3 x 0.9
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.931
Publication Date: August 28, 2007
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Product Description
New York Times columnist Frank Rich reviews the trajectory of fictions spun by the Bush administration from 9/11 to Hurricane Katrina, revealing the most brilliant spin campaign ever conducted.
Unabridged CDs - 8 CDs, 10 hours
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| Customer Reviews: Read 139 more reviews...
A Cultural View of the Iraq War November 28, 2008
This book is unique among the already vast literature on the Iraq War. It is authored by Frank Rich who was the New York Times theater critic before he became one of the paper's prominent op-ed writers. He is not a war correspondent but rather a social critic.
The title of the book reflects a social critic's approach. It focuses not on the war front but on how the Bush administration cynically sold the public on an unnecessary, "elective" war. If you have read Rich's columns in the past you will have read much of what is in this book. This book, however, ties all of the individual columns into a compelling narrative.
Rich meticulously documents the lies, distortions, and deception that led a guileless public to support a war that had nothing to do with the attacks on 9/11. The most valuable part of the book, in my view, is the timeline set forth at the end of the narrative. It factually documents what the administration knew privately and what their spokesman, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, Cheney, and Bush were saying publicly.
It is sickening to see an administration continually changing its story to fit the facts. It is revolting to see, at best, a lazy New York Times reporter like Judith Miller reporting "facts" about WMD that were being fed to her by Scooter Libby. It is sad to see Bob Woodward of Watergate fame have his journalistic credibility badly compromised because of his highly-trumpeted and cherished access to powerful people. His refusal to admit that he was the used rather than the user is damning.
It is mind-numbing to see how the administration would leak phony information to a reporter like Judith Miller and then cite its own anonymous leak as having been "reported by The New York Times." Willing media stooges are exposed throughout this book and Rich shows how much more credulous they were than the public; how access to power was more important than facts.
Gallup polls reflected greater public skepticism about an invasion of Iraq than the media. The media "watch-dog" was unquestioningly spreading administration lies about aluminum tubes, mobile biological labs, and other scare-mongering stories like smoking gun mushroom clouds. The media was complicit in all the lying leading up to the war.
What is most incredible is that George W. Bush won re-election in 2004. Rich shows that so many of those lies about nuclear and WMD programs were debunked soon after the invasion in March 2003. According to Rich, just as it did with the invasion of Iraq, the Bush cabal won re-election by creating its own reality for the public, separate and apart from actual fact. And they were successful. They produced a separate reality that made a rich kid draft dodger into a top gun hero and a Vietnam War hero into a coward and a traitor.
Rich shows how Hurricane Katrina brought down the curtain on the whole Bush show in August 2005. There was too much press access to hide the kind of mistakes that were hidden during the height of the Iraqi insurgency. His favorability numbers, so deeply coveted by a man who never looked at polls (another lie) would never recover from pictures of Americans standing on their roofs begging to be rescued.
It is an Orwellian experience to see the exculpatory remark "I don't think anybody could have predicted" made by Condoleeza Rice about the 9/11 attacks in May 2002 juxtaposed against President Bush's "I don't think anyone could have anticipated" the breech of the levees caused by Hurricane Katrina on the same page. But there it is in this book. Rich highlights the irony of those parallel lies and how they strikingly symbolize the damage this administration has done to America; both abroad and at home. It is hard to keep your lies straight when you lie so much.
Few get off easily in this book; not the administration, not the media, not the public. Frank Rich is a social critic first of all. The Bush administration is the chief malefactor in this dreadful fiction turned reality. The media, though, was passive and lazy in its reporting. The majority of the American public was unable to tell the difference between a TV reality show and the true reality in Iraq exposed after the invasion. This was shown by the large number of Americans who still believed there was a connection between 9/11 and Iraq.
Yet Rich cannot answer the basic question of the Iraq War. Why in the world did we invade Iraq? There have been a myriad of "explanations" These range from a real belief that Iraq had WMD, to Saddam's attempt to kill Bush's father. Not even members of the Bush administration seem to agree. Rich concludes that we will probably never know.
A credible case can be made that several powerful people and institutions with different rationales for invading Iraq all converged thanks to a weak and incurious president. Bush, as Rich asserts in his introduction, is a rich kid draft dodger who wanted to show how "tough" he was; a first class chickenhawk.
The Road That Ran Off The Cliff November 24, 2008
"The Greatest Story Ever Sold," by Frank Rich, describes major events that occurred in the United States between 2000 and 2006, the Bush Administration's reaction to them, the Bush Administration's creation of events, the reaction of the press to the Administration, and the people's reaction then and at the time of publishing to both the Administration and the press. While many people can site the events and their versions of them - certainly now, possibly at the time - it is helpful to have this recent history placed in a coherent manner to see the cause and effect of the Administration's actions.
Rich, an op-ed columnist, drama critic and a writer about culture and politics, has used his insight in all of these areas to describe the road of events that has now left us over $10 trillionn in debt, fighting two foreign wars, American cities drowned, and actual, treasonable, impeachable scandals that have taken place in the Administration. As another reviewer pointed out, there are no new revelations in this book, but I'm not sure that there was ever meant to be: the book can be another expose of new audacities of the Bush Administration, or it can simply be a logical, factual, orderly statement of facts and opinions of what has happened. I say "opinion" because, for example, when Valerie Plame was revealed to be employed by the CIA, a prevalent theory for this treasonable act to be made was as revenge for her husband's editorial being printed in the paper. Rich argues that her CIA connection was because the Administration was concerned that it would expose them for lying the U.S. into war with Iraq. Both seem plausible, but there is a difference in the reason behind Plame's being named a CIA agent.
All in all, it is an interesting, valuable book, recommended to those who want to view how this country went from where it was in the 1990s to where it is today - like driving on a country road to going over the mountainside. The one, small dissonant note that I have with Rich's writing is that sometimes the comparisons with the facts and movies/stage/culture tended to get a little thick. But away from that, if you want to know the road that we traveled then and are going on now, read this book.
 Stop the presses: the Administration engages in P.R.! August 31, 2008
5 out of 8 found this review helpful
My experience with this book: in short, ennui and deja vu, not to borrow too much from the French. As to be expected by now, we get breathless reporting on how the Administration tries to spin the press and put its actions in the most favorable light possible. Imagine that. And, as to be expected, we also get the yawn-inducing laundry list of supposed sins, along with generally poor editing and overall intellectual sloppiness. Briefly:
* Blame for Bush for not being alcoholic *enough* to swear off the booze: "He was never a clinical alcoholic, never drank during the day (or every day), never needed to seek out A.A. or any other treatment" (pp 12-13).
* "already extant" stem-cell lines (p 20). Suggestion: if you're going to use words like "extant," you should make sure you know what they mean. It's a redundancy to say "already extant," since the word means "already existing."
* Blaming America for the terrorist attacks. Regarding the pre- 9-11 culture: "A decade of dreaming was coming to an end. The dream had been simple--that Americans could have it all without having to pay any price" (p 22).
ASIDE. It's funny and ironic that so many neo-Puritans are on the left, from Al Gore to Mike Bloomberg to the theater critic. People who think that a necessary adjunct to life is suffering for our sins, whether those sins be religious or secular, real or imagined, individual or institutional.
* Blaming Bush for not going back to the capital fast enough after the terrorist attack: "September 11 was the first time since the British set fire to the White House in 1814 that a president abandoned the capital for security reasons" (p 24). First, to point out the obvious, Bush was in Florida when the Mohammedans attacked. He wasn't in the White House, so couldn't have "abandoned" it. Second, if Flight 93 hadn't crashed in Pennsylvania, Bush might have been killed in Flight 93's attack.
* "The farther away Americans were from 9/11, both in time and geography, the faster it faded" (p 38). Wrong. New York was the epicenter of the attacks yet also one of quickest to become anti-Bush and anti-war.
ASIDE. It's factually-challenged statements like the one above that make me think the theater critic really needs to get out of his bubble and see the rest of the U.S. The Upper West Side is an awfully small part of America. If you're an Upper West Side liberal who thinks people west of the Hudson River are rubes and hicks, fine. Just don't pretend to speak for them.
* Enron was "the greatest single financial patron of Bush's political career" (pp 42-43). This is just a really mentally challenged factual assertion. Companies cannot donate to politicians. 2 U.S.C. 441b(a).
* "Bush had never run a successful business" (p 51). The Texas Rangers baseball franchise wasn't a successful business?
* "Well before the missed Qaeda signals of the summer of 2001..." (p 51). Like the missed "Al" (or "al" -- the book can't make up its mind) in front of "Qaeda" in that sentence?
* The 9/11 Commission supposedly concluded that Mohammed Atta's meeting in Prague with Ahmad al-Ani, the Iraqi intelligence officer, "never took place" (pp 65, 128). Wrong. The CIA director told the 9/11 Commission: "`Atta may also have traveled outside of the U.S. in early April 2001 to meet an Iraqi intelligence officer, although we are still working to corroborate this'" (9/11 Report p 386). This statement has never been retracted or modified.
* The book is smart enough not to directly claim Bush's "sixteen words" about Iraq seeking uranium from Africa were false. The book *implies* that by concentrating on the forged uranium purchase offer documents (pp 71-72, 97-100, 143), but in point of fact, as the theater critic probably knows, chances are good that Iraq *did* seek uranium from Niger. See the Senate Intelligence Committee Report of July 7, 2004 p. 42.
* "No American weapons inspectors...would ever find any weapons" of mass destruction (p 102). Wrong. In fact, about 500 chemical weapons had been found in Iraq as of early 2006, according to the National Ground Intelligence Center, the successor to the Iraq Survey Group. (U.S. House of Representatives - Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, June 21, 2006). It's true that these weapons were mostly left over form the Iran-Iraq war, and were not new weapons or weapons produced by mobile laboratories -- but it's flat-out false to say that no WMDs were found in Iraq.
* The book seems shocked that pre- 9/11 the Bush Administration was planning for a possible showdown with Saddam Hussein (pp 113, 218), but fails to mention that the overthrow of Saddam had been an explicit U.S. policy since the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. Of *course* there would be pre-9/11 and pre-Iraq War discussions about overthrowing Saddam. That and the fact that he was ordering constant attacks on U.S. planes in the no-fly zones. If a country tries to shoot down your planes thousands of times, isn't that country at war with you?
* The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were supposedly "Rove minions" (p 137). Oh? Prove it. The theater critic provides some six degrees of separation stuff to back up this claim, like the fact that the Swifties' communications director once worked for a group that was bankrolled by a Bush donor (pp 139-140). That's riveting evidence all right. George Tenant would call it a slam dunk. Face it, the theater critic has squat because if Rove really had been controlling the Swifties, that would be explosive, because it is illegal for a political campaign to coordinate with an outside, 527 group. 2 U.S.C. 441a(a)(7). Which is likelier: the left has overlooked a chance to nail Rove for a crime -- or the theater critic is talking out of his hat?
* In 2004 the Rovian attack machine set out to have Kerry "literally stripped of his medals" (p 137). No, the only person who "literally stripped" John Kerry of his medals was John Kerry. He did that all by himself when he took his medals off and threw them over the White House fence.
ASIDE. "literally stripped." Wow. Literally? So Rove is just going to walk up to Kerry and strip those medals off of him?
* Supposedly Kerry was opposed to same-sex marriage (p 151). That's both true and false. It's true that by Election Day 2004 Kerry said he opposed same-sex marriage. But it's false because Kerry at one point did support it ("Kerry Signed Letter Backing Gay Marriage," USA Today, Feb 11, 2004) but later flip-flopped on the issue.
* Bush's flight suit he wore to the aircraft carrier Lincoln was a "costume" (p 156). Because the theater critic seems to be factually deficient regarding military matters, let me point out that a flight suit is required gear for flying a plane. It's a "costume" in the same sense a fire fighter's clothing and helmet is a "costume."
* The book describes the Jayson Blair plagiarism and fabrication scandal, and the Memogate scandal, then goes on to say: "These scandals played perfectly into the Administration's insidious efforts to blur the boundary between its reality and actual reality" (p 163). So let me get this straight: story fabrication and libel are "actual reality" and anyone trying to say otherwise has an alternative reality? Unbelievable.
* Rove supposedly was the source of the Valerie Plame leak (pp 179-180). Wrong. Actually, it was Richard Armitage. See "Hubris" by Isikoff and Corn.
* The book spends a lot of time blasting Bush for the feds' Katrina response (pp 198-205), but makes no mention of the incompetent New Orleans and Louisiana response, as well as the Posse Comitatus problem. I'm not saying that what the theater critic has to say about Bush and Katrina is factually incorrect, it's just distorted because it omits the other pieces of the picture.
* I thought the book would be too smart to fall into the Iraq / "imminent threat" trap but apparently the theater critic couldn't help himself. He implies the Administration said or believed that Saddam was an imminent threat (p 211). Wrong. Bush never said Saddam posed an "imminent threat" or imminent anything. In fact, in his 2003 State of the Union Speech, Bush said just the opposite, that we should attack Saddam *before* he became an imminent threat: "Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late."
Overall, I have to admit that while the book breaks no new ground in any way, it *is* clever enough not to fall for some of the standard anti-Bush lies -- for example that Iraq never sought uranium from Africa or that Bush declared the war to be over in the May 1, 2003 "Mission Accomplished" speech. The theater critic does seem to be aware that there are facts other than those in his alternative universe. That's a bit of a relief at this stage, and bumps this book up to two stars.
 A troublesome, truthful 'must read' about the incompetent Bush years. July 11, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
In this day and age of sanitized/filtered news and monopolized corporate media, it is refreshing to read a 'timeline' book that delineates all the mistakes, bad schemes, and outright lies of 'Bush 2' and company, written by an astute and honest researcher and chronicler. The book presents disturbing fact after fact that should trouble every American, and is not partisan in any way. Republicans, as well as Democrats, should be at least concerned, and at most outraged at all the inept mismanagement and lies that led to the Iraqi invasion, as well as the many other incompetencies of the Bush administration. From his ignoring the message that the second tower was attacked while reading to children to 'Yellowcake' to wrongly outing Valerie Plame to the Iraq war buildup based on lies/false information to the Iraqi war mismanagement to Bush staging 'Mission Accomplished' to Abu Ghraib to not providing proper armor/combat vehicles to our soldiers to the intransigence of Katrina to the 'swiftboating' of a war hero, John Kerry (while Bush saw no combat duty) to the fast rising oil/gas prices to the brainwashing of the largely gullible and malleable American public, etc. etc. etc. This excellent book essentially 'covers all the bases' when it comes to why George Bush will be considered one of the worst, if not THE worst Presidents we've ever had. Frankly, if 'Shrub' was a corporate CEO, his rear-end would have been fired a LONG TIME AGO! How this way below average buffoon ever made it to be POTUS in the first place is the shock of the century.
Too Much Sadly True Information June 21, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
The timeline at the end of the book ties up the case: for some unknown reason (perhaps just to get re-elected) the party in power deliberately takes the country to war. Every documented lie is exposed. Sometimes the anguish I felt reading this book caused me to put it aside and I felt despair about our miss-directed lives as citizens.
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