Bushit! How the Bush Crew is Wrecking America and Endangering the World.

• Author: Harding, Bruce
• Position: Book review

BUSHIT! How the Bush Crew is Wrecking America and Endangering the World

Author: Jack Huberman

Published by: Granta Books, London, 2006, 430pp, $29.99.

This is a populist book, the successor to Huberman's The Bush-Hater's Handbook (2003) and a primer for dinner party arguments during the second 'W' Bush term. One can almost envisage this sturdy paperback being tossed around a meal table as rival views rage. It is reminiscent of David Corn's The Lies of George W. Bush (Crown, 2003) but is (surprisingly) less scholarly than Kitty Kelley's magnificent 2004 tome, The Family: The True Story of the Bush Dynasty. Huberman is a Canadian now living in New York and lists his various careers as a cartoonist, illustrator, graduate student, magazine writer, freelance book editor, newspaper reporter and stock trader. In other words, is he here riding yet another gravy train?

Huberman organises this book around Big Headings and set themes which explore the corporate graft of the 'W-ites': Abortion and Birth Control, Corporate-Owned Government, Economic Policy, Election 2004, Energy Policy, Environment, Foreign Aid, Foreign Policy, Free Speech, Dissent and Press Freedom, Health Care and Profiteering, Homeland Insecurity, Hurricane Katrina, Iraq, Media and Image Control, and Corporate War Profiteering. You get the gist.

Francis Fukuyama's new book America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (2006)--which probably should be sub-titled 'conned by the neocons'--is bound to offer a far more interesting (insider) read than this essentially pointless pop-gossipy expose of 'the profusion of Bush administration outrages' past and current, designed to give us 'the deeper, fuller understanding and loathing of Bushism that two additional years of suffering and study have produced'. The market for such exposes is glutted (with important texts like John Dean's Worse Than Watergate, Joe Conason's Big Lies, Paul Krugman's The Great Unraveling, John Newhouse's Imperial America, Clyde Prestowitz's Rogue Nation, Benjamin Barber's Fear's Empire and websites like MisLeader.org) and, given that 'Bush II' will complete his erratic and embarrassing second term, it is difficult to fathom the rationale for this rather tedious pseudo-bible of bullet-points, bold headings and rant-boxes to tell us what most informed people already know, at least in broad brush. Put bluntly, we have heard almost all of it before and it did not change the 2004 election...