Radar's media critic on George W. Bush and Pakistan

Oedipus Tex, Invisible WMD's, and the Axis of Circumcision

Run, don't walk (go to Amazon if you must), to buy Craig Unger's brilliant new book The Fall of the House of Bush. Forget about the clash of civilizations between Islam and the West. Unger's subject is the war that really matters: the one between Islamic, Jewish, and Christian fundamentalists on one side, and the scientific (reality-based!) post-Enlightenment world that some of us still prefer to inhabit. A veteran magazine writer and author of the 2004 best-seller House of Bush, House of Saud, Unger combines reams of original reporting (he went undercover with a group of Evangelical tourists to "walk where Jesus walked") and all the previously available data to produce the rarest kind of political book—a page-turner that reads like a grim thriller. Among its many highlights:

• The frisson the neocons felt when they found a perfectly blank slate on a Texas ranch when they started their secret visits to an ambitious young George W. Bush in 1999—and how they carried out the most successful brainwashing since Angela Lansbury anticipated Lynne Cheney in The Manchurian Candidate.

• Boy George's Oedipal Tex struggle to destroy his father by choosing Bush 41's biggest enemies (beginning with Donald Rumsfeld) for top jobs in the Administration, and how he filled the rest of the government with Evangelicals—the same people Bush pere had always dismissed as "the extra-chromosome crowd."

• Boy's reported born-again experience with Billy Graham is pure invention. His real religious awakening was encouraged by ex-'60s Jesus freak Arthur Blessitt, the aptly named born-again who first found the limelight preaching at concerts with the Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, and Jefferson Airplane. (Blessitt also presided over a Sunset Strip coffeeshop, where he ministered to a happy band of bikers, hippies, and occasional Mafia hit men.)

• Colin Powell must have known the intelligence books had been cooked before he made his notorious presentation about Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" to the United Nations.

• David Brooks's complaint about enemies of the neocons who have imagined "... a Yiddish Trilateral Commission. ... We actually started calling it the Axis of Circumcision."

• Midge (wife of ur-neocon and Giuliani foreign-police adviser Norman Podhoretz) Decter's observation that lesbians seem to enjoy the company of "large and ferocious dogs," and Gore Vidal's immortal reply: "Well, if I were a dyke and a pair of Podhoretzes came waddling toward me on the beach, copies of Leviticus and Freud in hand, I'd get in touch with the nearest Alsatian dealer pronto."

The most terrifying news to emerge from the book is Unger's contention that the Cheney gang will do whatever it takes to crown their triumph in Iraq with something even lovelier: an additional war with Iran. It's the latest reminder that neither the Democrats nor the Washington press corps has ever come close to fighting this fire with the flood that will be necessary to extinguish it. Remember: The most energetic part of this coalition is praying for the apocalypse. Will enough of us reality-based types ever come together to defeat them?

This Week's Media Hits and Misses

The crisis in Pakistan provided the freshest evidence of the genius of the Bush foreign policy apparatus. Shockingly, putting the amorphous concept of "the war on terror" at the center of a plan held together by string and duct tape does not make for a coherent strategy. Who knew? Here's some of the coverage.

Hit: Frank Rich, Sunday's go-to guy for the freshest intelligence on the Bush mob, explains how the president made himself the perfect role model for our man in Islamabad.

Hit: Steve Coll's New Yorker Comment is a great Pakistan situationer. It ends by predicting that Musharraf's presidency will end just like Richard Nixon's—with a helicopter taking off from the lawn of the presidential palace.

Hit: Sid Blumenthal's diatribe: "On the rubble of neoconservatism, the Bush Administration has adopted 'realism' by default, though not even as a gloss on its emptiness."

Hit: Fred Kaplan's slightly calmer dissection of the Pakistani dilemma in Slate.

Hit: Shoot the lawyers first. Reporting from Islamabad on World News Tonight, ABC correspondent Dan Harris expressed his astonishment over the admirable role lawyers were playing in the Pakistani protest:

HARRIS: During the crackdown in Myanmar, it was the monks who symbolized the resistance. China's Tiananmen Square, it was the students. In Pakistan, somewhat improbably, it is, thus far, the lawyers.

[To a demonstrator] In the United States, lawyers are viewed with some skepticism. So it's a little surprising ... for us, that lawyers are on the front lines here.

ATTORNEY: Sir, here we prove that here the matter is not money. Here, the matter is our dignity. ... We are not scared."

Harris added: "These are not white-shoe lawyers."

Hit: Jon Lee Anderson's Letter from Iraq. A lengthy but fascinating look at the complex moral arithmetic involved in securing Baghdad's Ghazaliya suburb. Most chilling: the story of an American collaborator whose goal is to avenge the death of his older brother by killing 100 men.

Hit: David Gates's splendid essay about the culture of the '60s in Newsweek.

Miss: Everything else in Newsweek's tired '60s cover package (especially the hideous Peter Max cover).

Hit: The Guardian reveals everyone's favorite get-out-of-jail-free card in Iraq: "Iran made me do it."

Under the MSM Radar:
Hit: Glenn Greenwald's fierce public battle with Gen. David Petraeus's chief spokesman, Col. Steven Boylan, over an invective-filled e-mail ("You are not a journalist nor do you have any journalistic ethical standards, as we found out from the last time I engaged with you") that had Boylan's return address on it. After Greenwald posted it, Boylan denied sending it, even though an analysis by several experts confirmed that it came through the same military computers that other genuine Boylan e-mails had flowed through. Mystery mounted as Boylan showed absolutely no interest in determining who was impersonating him—if in fact anyone really was.

Miss: So far, no mainstream paper has touched the story, although the Washington Post's Howie Kurtz was asked about it in one of his online chats. Howie's trenchant analysis: "It's a very strange tale. I'm not sure what to make of it. I think Boylan's complaint had more to do with the publication of what he contends is a fake e-mail sent by someone else."
Heart-warming details: Col. Boylan freelances for the extreme right wing magazine Human Events, and his wife and children manned a phone bank for George Bush in 2004.
(Thanks to FCP blog editor JWS.)

Winner: Sr. Cpo. MALCOLM NANCE (Ret.), a former Naval instructor who eviscerated the Administration's pro-torture policies on a News Hour debate against Sinner terrorism consultant Neil Livingstone, whose revolting arguments in favor of giving the president a "full toolkit" were made more so by his habit of licking his lips while describing his favorite torture techniques.

Winner: New latimes.com executive editor Meredith Artley, for convincing her bosses to add 12 slots so that she can revamp the site. Artley was poached from the International Herald Tribune's website; she's already getting rave reviews in Los Angeles.

BONDS OF FRIENDSHIP Imus, Russert

Sinners: When white boys are true asshole buddies: Tim Russert can't wait to go on Don Imus's new radio show, as long as Russert's NBC bosses don't object. "I know [Don Imus has] learned a lot from what happened," said Russert. "He told me as much."

Winner: Don't look for Tim at Gwen Ifill's dinner table any time soon. Gwen wrote what should have been the last word on the Imus debacle in the Times op-ed page last April. Unfortunately, it wasn't.

Sinners: Patricia Leigh Brown—and the 10 editors who read her story before printing it on the front page of the New York Times—for reporting that the AIDS epidemic started in 1990, and ended in 1995. (Even Andrew Sullivan didn't say it was over until 1996.)

Winner: Newsweek, for making everything old new again. When I was a boy, my favorite feature in the front of the book was "Where Are They Now." After an absence of several decades, it comes back as "Melting Into the Shadows." This week's melt: ex-congressman Gary Condit, who has become the operator of two failed Baskin-Robbins franchises in Arizona. Still, his father says he's "doing real good."

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ON THE RECORD

Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the secret Pentagon Papers history of the Vietnam War, spoke at American University earlier this fall, where he echoed Craig Unger's warning about the last act of the Bush Administration. (Naomi Wolf made many of the same points in the Guardian last April.)

Ellsberg:

"I think nothing has higher priority than averting an attack on Iran, which I think will be accompanied by a further change in our way of governing here that in effect will convert us into what I would call a police state.

"If there's another 9/11 under this regime, it means that they switch on full extent all the apparatus of a police state that has been patiently constructed, largely secretly at first, but eventually leaked out and known and accepted by the Democratic people in Congress, by the Republicans and so forth.

"Will there be anything left for NSA to increase its surveillance of us? They may be to the limit of their technical capability now, or they may not. But if they're not now, they will be after another 9/11.

"And I would say after the Iranian retaliation to an American attack on Iran, you will then see an increased attack on Iran—an escalation—which will be also accompanied by a total suppression of dissent in this country, including detention camps."

Let's hope that turns out to be a slight exaggeration.

Must Read: Hendrick Hertzberg's hilarious recap of flying saucers, drivers' licenses, and the Hillary pile-up. Plus the answer to this week's bonus question: Which American president saw twice as many UFOs as Dennis Kucinich?

Another day in the glorious "almost exclusively male world of big-time journalism." —Tom Brokaw, Boom!

Best Guest: The magnificent Maya Lin, on This Week, talking about the 25th anniversary of her Vietnam Memorial—the only thing that came out of that ghastly war that everyone agrees is genius.

Box Score
Sunday, November 11, 2007

	Meet the Press (NBC–Russert)	Face the Nation (CBS–Schieffer)	This Week (ABC–Stephanopoulos)
White Men	1	3	14(!)
White Women	0	1	3
Black Men	1	0*	1*
Gay People	0	0	0
Asian Women	0	1	1

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Charles Kaiser is the author of The Gay Metropolis and 1968 in America. He has been media editor for Newsweek, a member of the metro staff of the New York Times, and a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, where he covered the press and book publishing. He has also written for Vanity Fair, The Los Angeles Times, New York, The Washington Post, The New York Observer, Rolling Stone, Details, Interview, The Advocate, Vogue, and Salon. He has taught journalism at Columbia and Princeton. To find out more, visit charleskaiser.com
Research assistance: Thomas Rogers, Richard Vanderford