Amazon.co.uk
While numerous books have been written criticizing the policies and practices of the George W. Bush administration, few have been as foreboding about the meaning of those policies and practices as Mark Crispin Miller's
Cruel and Unusual. In Bush and company, Miller sees a regime comparable to the most ruthless authoritarian dictatorships of the modern era and warns that Americans, skillfully duped by a corrupt government and a complicit mass media, are blithely accepting the curtailing of their liberties and the eradication of their democracy. The attacks of September 11, 2001 and the tremendous fear and insecurity that they generated among the American people provided, in Miller's estimation, ample opportunity for Bush and company to move the country to a place where dissent is crushed by force, wars are started on the basis of lies, and democratic elections will soon be a thing of the past.
Cruel and Unusual makes a compelling case by providing massive amounts of evidence, some concrete and some speculative, although at times the sprawling range of his subject matter harms Miller's attempts to form a cohesive argument. And for someone writing a book about George W. Bush, Miller is awfully preoccupied with the treatment President Bill Clinton received from the press and right-wing activists. Particularly strong, however, are passages related to the build-up to war in Iraq and the discrediting of weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who insisted that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. Miller provides transcripts from cable news talk shows where administration spokesmen attack Ritter with the apparent assistance of like-minded hosts while Ritter himself doggedly defends himself and persistently rejects the main reason given for war.
Cruel and Unusual is one of the most energetic and dire criticisms of the Bush administration but its urgency is matched by the crimes it sees being committed.
--John Moe, Amazon.com
Product Description
President George W. Bush tends to blurt out all or part of what he's really thinking, even as he's trying to lie about it. George W Bush is so illiterate as to turn completely incoherent when he speaks without a script. He seems like too easy a target, but Dubya speaks for himself. Whether he's envisioning "a foreign-handed foreign policy", explaining the American military's role "to fight and be able to win war, and therefore prevent war from happening in the first place", or telling his nation that "more and more of our imports come from overseas", George W. Bush's appointment to the highest office in the world should strike fear into all our hearts. This book not only places the President in the context of other notorious dunces-in-chief, but shows him to be indisputably in a league of his own. Containing essays, famous interviews and classic comments, this book aims to offer more than just an amusing collection of Bush's gaffes - it is also a polemic on a culture so dependent on the emptiness of television that it has allowed a man who is unable to name the leaders of Pakistan, Chechnya or India to become US President.
