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?