Premium Members Get 10% Off and Earn Rewards Find Out More

A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency

Add to Wishlist

A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency

Paperback(Reprint)

$22.00

View All Available Formats & Editions

Paperback(Reprint)
$22.00

View All Available Formats & Editions

SHIP THIS ITEM

Qualifies for Free Shipping
PICK UP IN STORE
Check Availability at Nearby Stores

Available within 2 business hours

Want it Today?
Check Store Availability

Related collections and offers

Overview

The first true character study of a lost president and his disastrous legacy

In this fascinating, timely book, Glenn Greenwald examines the Bush presidency and its long-term effect on the nation, charting the rise and steep fall of the current administration, dissecting the rhetoric, and revealing the faulty ideals upon which George W. Bush built his policies. Enlightening and eye-opening, this is a powerful look at the man whose incapability and cowboy logic have left America at risk.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307354280
Publisher:	Crown Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/08/2008
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

GLENN GREENWALD is a contributing writer at Salon.com and the author of the political blog Unclaimed Territory. He has appeared on a variety of television and radio programs, and his first book, How Would a Patriot Act?, was an instant bestseller.

Read an Excerpt

chapter one Bush Agonistes
(Continues…)

Excerpted from "A Tragic Legacy"
by .
Copyright © 2008 Glenn Greenwald.
Excerpted by permission of Crown/Archetype.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Preface     ix
Bush Agonistes     1
The Manichean Warrior     39
The Manichean Road to Baghdad     97
Iran: The Next War?     153
The Manichean Paradox: Moral Certitude Tramples Moral Constraints     229
The Tragic Legacy of George W. Bush     265
Acknowledgments     285
Index     287

From the B&N Reads Blog

Page 1 of

Editorial Reviews

This is the best book about the worst president. Glenn Greenwald is to this administration as they've been to the country: devastating. This is more than a book: It's an act of patriotism."
—Alan Colmes, Hannity & Colmes, Fox News

“Glenn Greenwald’s excoriating analysis of the Bush presidency goes much deeper than mere polemics. His layered interpretation of the Manichean mentality that defines the Bush White House describes a disastrously inappropriate mindset for a modern power in a time of global turmoil. This early portrait of the Bush presidency and the right wingers who cheered it on will be read and appreciated for many years to come.”
—Scott McConnell, editor of The American Conservative

“In the bare-knuckle cacophony of the blogosphere Glenn Greenwald has been a beacon of clarity chronicling President Bush’s unfolding war on the rule of law. No one is better placed to explain how the president’s embrace of extremism in the battle against extremism has put the country’s most sacred ideals, even the country itself, under the gravest threat.”
—Josh Marshall, editor of Talking Points Memo

“Glenn Greenwald has emerged as one of the nation’s most incisive and articulate exponents of the critique of the Bush Administration. In admirably clear prose and with the ferocity of a former litigator, he is day in and day out building a powerful case against an undeniably consequential and radical presidency.”
—Dan Froomkin, WashingtonPost.com White House Watch columnist

“A compelling examination of how moral beliefs can drive political decisions, with disastrous consequences.”
—Booklist

“In A Tragic Legacy, [Greenwald] wrestles with much more significant and amorphous material as he attempts to trace the dangerous, stark philosophy underlying the most pernicious policies of the current administration and to tease out their implications for the character of this nation. To say that he succeeds is a massive understatement. From every aspect—writing, clarity of thought and most importantly, structure of the book (often neglected in similar works)—he pounds his argument home about the utter bankruptcy of thought behind the president’s words and actions: This is extremism. This is immoral. This is, ultimately, un-American at its core.”
—Daily Kos

"[Greenwald] has constructed an impressive argument about the basic template of the Bush Administration, and how it has tried to permanently alter America and our relationship to the world. Anyone who wants to successfully challenge and change that legacy owes it to themselves to read this book as an indispensable guide to how to proceed."
—Paul Rosenberg, AltWeeklies.com

"Greenwald has crafted for us and the world a moving, cathartic, and insightful book that hopefully will give the non-blogging public a new level of comprehension as to the dangers we face under an unbridled chief executive whose view of the world is not much more nuanced nor a great deal less fanatical than that of, say, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who also just so happens to believe that he’s on a personal 'Mission from God'. Ignore this book at your peril."
—FireDogLake.com

From the Publisher

A constitutional-law attorney submits a blistering, highly tendentious brief against President George W. Bush. Greenwald (How Would a Patriot Act?, 2006) unambiguously declares the Bush legacy "one of colossal failure" due almost entirely to the president's response to the attacks of 9/11. According to the author, echoing what has become a well-worn trope on the Left, this response unmasked Bush's Manichean world view, a simplistic proclivity to see events in terms of Good and Evil that precludes any possibility of reexamination or change. This cramped vision, Greenwald argues, is reinforced by the President's "hungry, crazed, warmongering ‘base' " composed of Middle East oil interests, Christian evangelicals and an Israel-centric strain of neoconservatives. The combined interests of these forces, requiring a seemingly endless stream of enemies, accounts for the restriction of our civil liberties, the intimidation of the press, the muzzling of dissent, the alienation of our allies. Where others might congratulate Bush for his moral clarity, Greenwald sees him as the leader of an administration obsessed with its own power. Among his more incendiary charges: Bush wanted to violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to demonstrate "he is more powerful than the law"; he has replaced his alcohol addiction with fervent evangelicalism; and any U.S. action against Iran will be dictated not by geopolitical considerations, but rather by the "President's personality." One endless denunciation follows another in prose so overheated and with judgments so uniformly negative and absolute as to mimic the very worldview the author rails against. What might have made a rousing article for, say, TheNation, collapses at book length, a victim of its own relentless, wild-eyed partisanship. Red meat for Bush haters; a tedious, predictable bore for everyone else.

Kirkus Reviews

A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency

A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency

Paperback(Reprint)

Paperback(Reprint)

Related collections and offers

Overview

Product Details

About the Author

Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Customer Reviews

Related collections and offers

Overview

Product Details

About the Author

Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Related Subjects

Customer Reviews