Customer Reviews

Thank You, President Bush: Reflections on the War on Terror, Defense of the Family, and Revival of the Economy

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Not since George Orwell's 1984 have I read such a sublime commentary on power and politics.

This is a great great book. There are too many left-wing radical liberals that question our political leaders, especially our great President George W. Bush. I think it's about time that us comrades stand up and denounce that kind of behaviour for the communistic threat to American that it is.

Questioning leadership? Writing books about the President in an objective manner? What's that all about? The only truth we need is what what the President tells us we need.

I can walk around with this book and feel proud and know that no one will call the secret service and have me arrested for reading offensive material.

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

You've Got To Be Kidding Me! This is as bad as the billboard in the south with Bush's photo on it. Just from the cover alone, you know this book is pure propaganda. The introduction is from his BROTHER! How critical would he ever be? Get commentators who are actually FAIR and in the middle of the road.

But you can't do that with a book like this. Because all the facts have prooven over and over and over and OVER again that the war on terror has beena failure! With each failed reasoning to go to war, they change to a NEW reason!

This is coming out just in time for the 2006 election, how perfect.

As the blurb promises, this book offers excellent "analysis." However, one area not fully covered is how the Bush administration fits into the history of political thought. For example, I highly recommend reading this book along side The Fourteen Defining Characteristics of Fascism, by Dr. Lawrence Britt, Spring 2003, Free Inquiry

Dr. Lawrence Britt has examined the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia) and several Latin American regimes. Britt found 14 defining characteristics common to each:

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism - Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.

2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights - Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.

3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause - The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial, ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.

4. Supremacy of the Military - Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.

5. Rampant Sexism - The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution.

6. Controlled Mass Media - Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.

7. Obsession with National Security - Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.

8. Religion and Government are intertwined - Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.

9. Corporate Power is protected - The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.

10. Labor Power is suppressed - Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.

11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts - Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked.

12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment - Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.

13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption - Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.

14. Fraudulent Elections - Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

I'm going to also write a book on nuclear fission, auto mechanics and building skyscrapers. No wait, I don't know anything about those subjects either.

President Bush's noble crusade to free Iraq from the liberal secular humanist yoke of the Saddam Hussein's of the world has set in motion an irrevocable chain reaction of incredibly good goodness. The "anything goes" Clinton-mentality of mid 90s Iraq has been supplanted with an "everything goes (boom)" mentality.

We will fight the terrorists over there so that we don't have to fight them over here, and if we don't find any over there, why, we'll create conditions suitable to their tenure. As to the WMD's, like God, their existence cannot be disproven.

Liberals are trapped in modernism, with their delusions of empirical reality, that there exists or do not exist terrorists or WMD's independent of our observing them. As Professor Sokal argues in "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", quantum mechanics has shattered the ingenuous Newtonian faith in an objective, pre-linguistic world of material objects ``out there.''

And in as much as the ontological categories of atomism and reductionism have been overthrown, so too is the "law" of diminising marginal returns, that tyrannical classist dogma of classical demand side Keynesianism, overthrown in favor of a law of increasing marginal returns, hence the supply side Keynesianism which has so strengthened our economy through the gradual mothballing of progressive taxation and the inflation of military spending on inapplicable technologies, such that DARPA may embrace its true dadaist mission of disjunctive production by which defense initiatives are funded inversely proportional to their actual usefulness. The arguement that our wealth disparity may approach 3rd world levels in the next few decades is coded racism.

We must learn to stop worrying and love the bomb. All your base are belong to us.

Part paean, part apologia, part theater of the absurd. Only Christians who religiously watch "The Factor" or public school children on psychotropic drugs prescribed by their resident shrinks will take this book seriously.

Here are some surprising things that are justified or glossed over in this volume:

How imperialistic crusades that benefit international crime syndicates (oil, military, pharmaceutical corporations), the Likud Party, and the U.S.-controlled international drug cartels are justifiable for "national security" reasons.

How $2 billion per day deficits and lax monetary policy have "jump-started" a sustained economic recovery that even our grandchildren will enjoy (provided that are not drafted as cannon-fodder in the current Hundred Years War).

How increased funding for Planned Parenthood through Title X and the allocation of grants to the WHO's African sterilization program is consistent with Christian principles of family values. (G.W.'s granddaddy, btw, was the Treasurer of Planned Parenthood.)

How pushing for corporate money grabs such as CAFTA and the FTAA is consistent with U.S. sovereignty.

How the Department of Homeland Security, empowered by the "Patriot" Acts, only resembles the German Stassi (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, lit. "Ministry for State Security") on paper, but is no actual threat to our civil liberties.

The book could be excused if the authors left the impression that they were laughing as they wrote it. Propaganda with a wink and a wry smile can be entertaining if handled adroitly. Unfortunately one soon realizes that the writers are as serious as TSA officials frisking down nine month old babies at air port terminals (an outrage my youngest child was subjected to).

After finishing the book, you will realize that you cannot (excuse the paraphrase of our Malaprop-in-Chief) misunderestimate the Bush cult's ability to disassemble.

Considering that this administration has bought off journalists, threatened news media and lied to the public at every turn, it is no surprise that a collection of spin so far-reaching has made it into print. I did not have the heart to waste my hard earned money on it. The local library had a copy. Luckily no one else bothered to read it.

As collections of refuse go, it is quite the production.

We only have three more dreadful years left. I am sure that Aman Verjee has already begun his latest venture into political fiction. I can't wait to studiously avoid it when the spin doctors produce that collection as well.

Seeing other reviews make me regret yet another decision by this administration. I really had hoped that Harriet Miers was on the bench. Her legal writing would have replaced the funny pages as my morning entertainment.

This tripe is about as fair and balanced as Fox news. If you want to read right-wing propaganda, here's your book. If you don't care about truth, here's your book. If you want to feel good about having voted for the worst president this country has ever had, here's your book.

I bought the book looking for some humor, thinking it had to be satire. Beware, this is not humor it's intended to be taken seriously! What a bunch of tripe!