Daydream
Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas
Wrecked American Power
by Fred Kaplan
America's power is in decline, its
foreign policy adrift, its allies
alienated, its soldiers trapped in a war
that even generals regard as unwinnable.
What has happened these past eight years
is well-known. Why it happened continues
to puzzle. In Daydream Believers,
celebrated Slate columnist Fred Kaplan
combines in-depth reporting and
razor-sharp analysis to explain just how
George W. Bush and his aides got so far
off track -- and why much of the nation
followed.
For eight years, Kaplan reminds us, the
White House -- and many of the nation's
podiums and opinion pages -- rang out with
appealing but deluded claims: that we live
in a time like no other and that,
therefore, the lessons of history no
longer apply; that new technology has
transformed warfare; that the world's
peoples will be set free, if only America
topples their dictators; and that those
who dispute such promises do so for
partisan reasons. They thought they were
visionaries, but they only had visions.
And they believed in their daydreams.
American
Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of
Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money
in the 21st Century
by Kevin
Phillips
From Ancient Rome
to the British Empire, Phillips
demonstrates that every world-dominating
power has been brought down by a related
set of causes: a lethal combination of
global over- reach, militant religion,
resource problems, and ballooning debt. It
is this same axis of ills that has come to
define America's political and economic
identity in the past decade. Military
miscalculations in the Middle East, the
surge of fundamentalist religion, the
staggering national debt, the costs of
U.S. oil dependence -- together these
factors are undermining our nation's
security, solvency, and standing in the
world. If left unchecked, the same forces
will bring a debt- bloated, preachy,
energy-starved America to its knees. With
an eye on the past and a searing vision of
the future, Phillips has written a book
that no American can afford to
ignore.
More than seventy-five books attacking
George W. Bush have been published so far.
Now, finally, there's a book that sets the
record straight against a backdrop of
media bias. And it's not by a conservative
idealogue but by an award-winning
independent reporter who set out to find
the real President Bush behind the
two-dimensional public image.
