Ooh, I want this book. This article is in Salon, which means you have to watch the ad to see it, but I'll excerpt some...
...What's sinister to Phillips is the way the Bush family, using that vast network of business, intelligence and government connections, managed to elect not just one president against all political odds (George H.W. Bush lost two Texas Senate races, only to be saved by Nixon with appointments as ambassador to China and then CIA director) but an incredible two. Given the size of the first Bush loss to Bill Clinton in 1992, as well as the mediocrity of the son who aspired to succeed him, Phillips finds it astonishing that the family was able to use its vast web of shadowy and sunshiny connections again to "restore" the Bush dynasty in the White House -- "a turn that would have surprised and presumably appalled the founding fathers," he writes...
...Phillips is at his best showing how the sins of the first George Bush continue to plague the U.S... Clearly we're still living with the consequences of so many Reagan-Bush foreign policy bungles today: backing the mujahedin in Afghanistan against the Soviets, which gave rise to the al-Qaida-sheltering Taliban; arming Saddam to fight Iran during the Iran-Iraq war; playing games with Iran, too, first through the 1980 "October surprise" (there's strong evidence that Bush, along with Reagan campaign manager Bill Casey, another spymaster, played a role in reaching out to Iran's leaders to prevent a pre-election release of the U.S. hostages that might have helped Jimmy Carter), then with the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal at the end of Reagan's term...
...American Dynasty" makes you realize...why Bush is the ideal Christian-right president. He fits the Fundamentalist Project's criteria for the type of person who's attracted to this rigid brand of Christianity: He was a rootless (albeit wealthy) ne'er-do-well who couldn't quite find his way in business, fought a drinking problem and then turned his life around, with the help of Billy Graham, when he adopted a fundamentalist approach to Christianity. He was almost literally saved by Jesus, and where fundamentalists and Southerners never trusted his father, they embrace George W. as one of them. He repays them with coded biblical imagery in his speeches, from his constant references to "evil" to his public reliance on the power of prayer, plus a Middle East policy that seems tailor-made to Christian right "end times" dogma...
...Both Christian fundamentalists and ultra-Zionists believe Israel is meant to inhabit the biblical lands of Judea and Samaria -- the Christians because that will supposedly trigger Armageddon, the battle between Christ and the Antichrist. Phillips gets up to his elbows in creepy "end times" activism -- Christian Southerners funding Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories, Texas cattlemen breeding the mythic "red heifer," whose appearance is supposed to signal Israelis to rebuild the old temple in Jerusalem and usher in Armageddon. He also cites polls showing that fully 45 percent of American Christians see the world ending with an apocalyptic battle. You start to wonder if somehow Bush really was destined to play this role -- and if there's a safe place anywhere on earth to sit out the cataclysm that, between his religion and his foreign policy, he seems capable of provoking...
That last bit gave me goosebumps.
There's also stuff in there about the Bushes' connections to the House of Saud, which are also detailed in Michael Moore's book. Did you know, for instance, that during the lockdown of all U.S. airspace in the days after 9/11, the Saudi royal family was allowed to fly their jet all over the US, picking up family members? They were then allowed to leave without being questioned, over the loud protestation of the F.B.I. How come that wasn't more widely reported?
I try not to veer into the "Vince Foster is but one of a trail of murders" school of conspiracy theory, but in the case of the Bushes it's hard not to be paranoid. I'm on pins and needles to see what happens in New Hampshire today. I'm hoping for a close race, so that no clear leader emerges. The Bushies will have to wait to launch their attack until a frontrunner has been established, and the longer they have to wait, the better.
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