Bushworld by Maureen Dowd
An Excellent Book
If metaphors were cigarettes, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd
would be a chain smoker. Through many years and countless columns
spent chronicling the fall of George H.W. Bush and the ascension of
George W. Bush, Dowd has employed analogies to feudalism, The
Godfather, Mini-Me, traditional mommy and daddy roles, and scores more.
In this, her first book, Dowd compiles well over a hundred columns and
summarizes the Bush dynasty under a single comprehensive analogy: an
alternate universe called Bushworld (Its their reality. We just live and die in
it.) Dowd, who as a reporter was assigned to cover the elder Bush, seems
to have a soft spot for the guy even as she describes a president with no
plans to do anything but remain president. But she is alarmed by the
younger Bush whom she sees surrounding himself with dangerous
ideologues and starting a poorly thought-out war with disastrous
consequences. Each column is relatively short, and Dowd never shares
much new information, but instead offers the kind of informed skeptical
perspective thats essential when interpreting the public s tatements of
policymakers. Dowds cleverness sometimes gets in the way of clarity, and
one occasionally wishes shed quit kidding around and say something
substantive, especially since the reader of Bushworld will likely be several
years removed from the news that inspired a particular column. Cleverness
can be a virtue for a writer as well, getting a laugh while perfectly
illustrating a point, such as when she says of the notoriously cloistered W.
All presidents are in a bubble, but the boy king was so insulated he was in
a thermos. Or when she says of the Iraq Wars aftermath for the first time in
history, Americans are searching for the reasons we went to war after the
war is over. --John Moe
Ms. Dowd definitely had vision and understanding of exactly what we
would be looking at as a nation. She could see the damage that was going
to be done by King George Bush. It is eerie to read this book now when it
was published at the end of 2004.
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