Fraud: The Strategy Behind the Bush Lies and Why The Media Didn't Tell You
- Book Review,
by Paul Waldman
From Publishers Weekly
Building on tenets laid out in The Press Effect, which he coauthored with Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Waldman deconstructs Bush's image as plainspoken, compassionate Dubya and accuses the media of failing to properly scrutinize the values of his presidency. Bush's inarticulateness misleads a gullible public into perceiving the president as a "real," ordinary American, Waldman argues, contending that Bush's administration actually serves a business elite rather than the average American. Meticulously combing through footnoted sources, Waldman carves an alternative portrait of a privileged and ruthless Bush who was gleeful over executions as Texas's governor, guilty of Enron-style business practices and contemptuous of the protective role of government. American journalists, in Waldman's view, are either muzzled or lack the policy expertise and research strengths to expose Bush effectively; as a result, the public is woefully confused. Waldman goes on to demythologize the so-called liberal bias of the media, comparing journalists' past persecution of Clinton with the relative mildness of present-day critiques of Bush. In his breakdown of Bush's tax policies and of the Republican Party's dominance by ultraconservative Southerners, Waldman is particularly strident. An assembly of sources and facts and a useful guide to right-wing rhetoric makes this handbook of anti-Bush ammunition-complete with an appendix that provides a "Guide to Key Lies and Misdirections-useful to partisans along with other Bush critiques by David Corn, Eric Alterman and Mark Green. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
The word liar has been used so many times in recent book titles about George Bush that Waldman, a political analyst and media critic, needed to come up with something different, although he manages to get lies into the subtitle. And, in fact, this book covers very much the same territory as the offerings of David Corn, Joe Conason, and others. As in those books, there is much here on Bush's image versus the reality of his history; the disconnect between his rhetoric and his actions; the events surrounding the buildup to the war in Iraq. But this volume stands out in the way it shapes the usual knocks against Bush into a well-thought-out strategy and then shows how the media's halfhearted perusal of various charges led to the party line becoming ensconced as truth. Waldman writes with ease and authority about his topic (footnotes appear on every page and then are expanded in an appendix, making it easy to check his sources). The occasionally sarcastic tone may grate on anyone who is reading to be persuaded, but in all probability, the book's audience will come largely from those already on Waldman's side. More red meat to feed the anti-Bush beast. Ilene Cooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Book Description
"Waldman gets right to the heart of the con." -Greg Palast, author of the New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy How to Build a Fraud --Portray son of one of America's most influential families as down-home Texan --Berate media as "liberal" until they stop asking tough questions --Take advantage of reporters' tendency to not check the facts --Mask reactionary policies in compassionate words and pictures --Push false stories from right-wing media into mainstream media --Extol the virtues of workers while systematically pushing an anti-labor agenda --Propose a series of tax cuts aimed at the wealthy, but sell them as a boon to ordinary Americans --Disguise destructive initiatives with friendly sounding names --Befriend media with "genuine guy" routine --Keep the public from accessing information --Maintain message discipline at all times --Question patriotism of anyone who disagrees --Repeat above until it all seems true In Fraud, leading political and media analyst Paul Waldman exposes the truth behind the rise of George W. Bush. What is revealed is more shocking than just a pattern of lies and incompetence. It is the story of how a clever political machine built a high-stakes game of deception, a policy of lies to capture the highest office in the free world, a fraud that continues to this day. The power of the fraud lies in the ability of the Bush machine to manipulate the press, and thereby avoid having the truth exposed. Waldman's findings reveal an astonishing record of how the nation's media has not only given Bush a pass again and again, but have failed to follow up on even the most openly dishonest parts of the Bush agenda. For all Americans who have been uneasy about the honesty of the Bush administration, but unsure what it means or how far it goes, Fraud is a shocking wake-up call.
About the Author
Paul Waldman is a rising star in the world of political commentary. Formerly the associate director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, he is currently the executive editor of The Gadflyer, an Internet magazine about politics launched in January 2004. In late 2002, Waldman published The Press Effect: Politicians, Journalists and the Stories That Shape the Political World, coauthored with Kathleen Hall Jamieson. Publishers Weekly called The Press Effect "fascinating, well documented and entertaining...Intelligent and timely, this is an important addition to the literature on media and current events." Waldman's writing has appeared in the American Prospect, the Washington Post, Newsday and a wide variety of scholarly journals and edited volumes. He has appeared on The O'Reilly Factor and been quoted in outlets such as the Associated Press, Newsday and USA Today as an expert on media coverage of politics, and he has been interviewed on numerous radio programs, including the Diane Rehm Show, On the Media and the Leonard Lopate Show. Waldman holds a Ph.D. in communication from the University of Pennsylvania's renowned Annenberg School and has been analyzing the interplay of media and politics for the last decade.
Excerpted from Fraud: The Strategy Behind the Bush Lies and Why the Media Didn't Tell You by Paul Waldman. Copyright © 2004. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
from the Introduction The unfortunate truth is this: George W. Bush is a fraud. From the moment he arrived on the national scene, George W. Bush has been telling us how honest he is, and for just as long-despite the ever-mounting evidence for the opposite conclusion-most Americans, even many of those who oppose him politically, have agreed. He may be unqualified and of questionable competence, and he may have a retrograde agenda, but at least he's honest. However, this belief is entirely false. As Thomas Paine wrote, "a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom."1 Bush's supporters will no doubt raise such an outcry at the assertion that Bush is fundamentally dishonest, but as you will see, the facts speak for themselves. What Bush and his advisers have perpetrated is nothing short of a fraud-and an epic one at that-that started when they began planning his ascension to the White House in the early 1990s and continues to the present day. The fraud involves the propagation of a set of central lies about Bush, each carefully crafted and spoken with a numbing repetition. He and his compatriots have known from the beginning that if the lies are asserted often enough, they will stand despite being refuted on a continual basis by Bush's actions. They have said that George W. Bush is an ordinary guy, that he believes in American values, that he loves freedom and democracy, that he is compassionate, that he brings Democrats and Republicans together, and above all, that he is a man of great character and integrity. Each of these contentions is demonstrably untrue, but each has nonetheless been often accepted by the press and largely accepted by the American people, including a healthy portion of those who voted against Bush in 2000 and plan to do so again in 2004. Contrary to what he seems to never tire of assuring us, George W. Bush is not a man of integrity; in fact, he ranks among the most dishonest presidents in American history. For this president, lying is only sometimes done ad hoc, as a reaction to an unexpected question or a discomforting criticism. But most often it is the essence of his political strategy, the key to every major policy move. Whether the topic is taxes or Social Security, the environment or education, Medicare or foreign wars, the aggressive deception of the American people is the foundation on which each Bush policy is built. He consistently deceives the American people by masking his agenda in a carefully constructed cloud of misleading rhetoric, pleasing pictures, disingenuous displays of emotions unfelt, and outright lies. We have seen in recent years how anger at political opponents can all too easily devolve into the belief that those one opposes are not merely wrong but positively evil. I make no such claim about George W. Bush. While he has a multitude of shortcomings as a president and a person, Bush is not evil. He believes, as all of us do, that he's trying to do the right thing. He often lies, but that does not mean that he is incapable of telling the truth. His policies are often ill-considered and detrimental to the goals he claims to espouse, but this does not mean that he does not occasionally make a good decision or two. So why would he choose this path of deception? At some point, George W. Bush took a good long look at who he was and what he wanted for the country and decided that the American people would never buy it if he gave it to them straight. He came to understand that they would never elect to the highest office in the land a man of such limited skills who had been given so much and accomplished so little, whose claim to power rested solely on his last name, who was so plainly hostile to the values on which their nation was founded. They would never assent to a reactionary agenda whose every element was opposed by a majority of Americans. They would never knowingly elect someone whose most passionate convictions lay in enhancing the wealth of the wealthy and the power of the powerful. So Bush and his political machine made their decision: the American people would have to be lied to. They would construct a persona that would be everything Bush was not. They would take the same old Republican agenda and cloak it in comforting catchphrases and pleasing visuals, presenting to the public a false image of sympathy. And they would repeat this message endlessly...
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