Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney's New World Order

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While numerous books have been written criticizing the policies and practices of the George W. Bush administration, few have been as foreboding about the meaning of those policies and practices as Mark Crispin Miller's Cruel and Unusual. In Bush and company, Miller sees a regime comparable to the most ruthless authoritarian dictatorships of the modern era and warns that Americans, skillfully duped by a corrupt government and a complicit mass media, are blithely accepting the curtailing of their liberties and the eradication of their democracy. The attacks of September 11, 2001 and the tremendous fear and insecurity they generated among the American people provided, in Miller's estimation, ample opportunity for Bush and company to move the country to a place where dissent is crushed by force, wars are started on lies, and democratic elections will soon be a thing of the past. Cruel and Unusual makes a compelling case by providing massive amounts of evidence, some concrete and some speculative, although at times the sprawling range of his subject matter harms Miller's attempts to form a cohesive argument. And for someone writing a book about George W. Bush, Miller is awfully preoccupied with the treatment President Bill Clinton received from the press and right-wing activists. Particularly strong, however, are passages related to the build-up to war in Iraq and the discrediting of weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who insisted that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. Miller provides transcripts from cable news talk shows where administration spokesman attack Ritter with the apparent assistance of like-minded hosts while Ritter himself doggedly defends himself and persistently rejects the main reason given for war. Cruel and Unusual is one of the most energetic and dire criticisms of the Bush administration but its urgency is matched by the crimes it sees being committed. --John Moe


From Publishers Weekly
In delivering this blunt jeremiad—Bush is "fascistic," "theocratic," a "crook," etc.—Miller (The Bush Dyslexicon) argues that the Bush-era press isn't simply biased, it has been lulled into an Orwellian false consciousness. One of the major examples Miller, a professor of media studies at NYU, offers is the case of Scott Ritter, the former U.N. weapons inspector who insisted before the war that Iraq probably had no unconventional weapons and was treated by TV interviewers like Paula Zahn as a near-stooge for Saddam. For Miller, further elements of the current order include electronic voting machines that he says were used to tilt the 2002 congressional elections and a cabal of Christian Reconstructionists that wants to impose theocracy on America. Miller, sometimes overheatedly, links the "extremist propaganda" of the Christian right to Bush assertions and policies, traces it to groups like the highly secretive Council for National Policy, and presents what he sees as a final agenda: "To such apocalyptic types, the prospect of a ruined earth is no big deal, as long as God can be alleged to go for it." While such arguments are familiar, as is the indignant tone, Miller's thoroughness and clarity in tracking down the sources of the policies he decries, and the ways in which they are disseminated, set the book apart. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist
Miller parsed the language of presidential-candidate George W. Bush in his Bush Dyslexicon (2001) to reveal a chilling mind-set that belied an aw-shucks style of speaking. Now he delivers a deeper, more urgent indictment of George W. Bush, in this case his presidency and the news media covering it. The book's centerpiece is Miller's detailed argument that the Bush administration cynically manipulated Americans-- with the unwitting help of such news organizations as CNN and the New York Times--into believing that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was a greater threat to global and national security than it actually was. The author also argues forcefully that the "Bush/Cheney New World Order" is systematically chipping away rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, showing in the process just how prescient the Founding Fathers were to anticipate such a threat. Surprisingly, Miller does not address the issue of embedded war correspondents, and his sometimes dyspeptic tone will probably not convert anyone on the other side of the aisle. Still, this is a critical contribution to America's internal, life-or-death debate over foreign and domestic policy. Alan Moores
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


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"I will use our military as a last resort, and our first resort." Thus spake Dubya-and Miller saw red. Miller (Media Studies/NYU; The Bush Dyslexicon, not reviewed) detests Bush, and for many reasons. One is the sitting president's refusal to speak and think clearly: "We should take especial notice," Miller writes, "that the president cannot speak standard English when he tries to talk about American democracy." Another is that selfsame president's imperial hauteur: to a reporter questioning the possibility of war in Iraq, Bush snapped, "I'm the person who gets to decide, not you," while to another-this time Bob Woodward of the Washington Post-he said, "I do not need to explain why I say things. . . . I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation." Then, of course, there's the war in Iraq, explained by a man whom Miller characterizes as an architect of modern neoconservative military strategy thus: "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." With reasons thus enumerated and plentiful, Miller proceeds to say many unkind things about Dubya, some of them funny, some incisive, some not. Speaking of Bush and his veep as a Borg-like unity-Bush/Cheney-he scores points by writing of the "imperial lavishness" of the administration's spending, which even conservatives have been complaining about. He scores more points by revealing that Bush/Cheney and minions Wolfowitz, Rumself, Perle, et al., had harbored designs on Iraq since at least 1998. And he offers a minor tour de force by contrasting Bill Clinton's supposedly scandalous on-the-tarmac haircut at LAX with a betterdocumented incident in which a Bush White House party of September 5, 2001, ended with the discharge of several hundred fireworks late at night and unannounced to the neighbors. It adds up to a nicely juicy rant-but not much more-some of the details of which may come as news to some readers. Author tour. Agent: Emma Parry/Fletcher & Parry


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