"The Bush Diaries" — Unmasking the President’s Performance

If you enjoy reading the posts on this blog, you are going to love the revelations in my new book entitled, “The Bush Diaries: A Citizen’s Review of the First Term”, which is due to be released later this summer. The Bush Diaries tracks the performance of President George W. Bush and attendant media pundits throughout his tumultuous first term.

In the past couple of years, I kept tabs on what the political pundits — at The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times — had to say about the President’s policies and responded to them in real time. Some of my opinions even got published by each one of these prestigious newspapers. The key difference between my book and others that you might have read on President Bush: I comment not only on the performance of the President, but I also critique the media pundits who evaluate the presidency. In fact, The Bush Diaries has a few “Great Moments in Punditry” that would make aficionados of “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” proud. However, my only caveat being there is nothing fake about the news in my book.

The Bush Diaries is a compendium of various letters — to the editors of the aforementioned newspapers — that I wrote during the second half of Bush’s first term. Other contemporaneous articles that I had written earlier on the President’s economic and foreign policies cover the first half of his term. In developing the book, I organized my articles and letters in a chronological order and then inserted a current preface to each one of them, so that the entire narrative reads like a running commentary on the Bush presidency.

It is important to keep the Bush Administration’s “past actions” in mind (for example, their machinations prior to the Iraq War), while contemplating support for likely “future events” (e.g. dealing with the crises in Iran and North Korea). I took the liberty of offering suggestions and making recommendations on a number of economic and foreign policy issues, which I believe will impact the President’s second term.

The Bush Diaries offers a simple foreign policy message to the President — stick with those comfortable Cs in dealing with other countries, especially in the Muslim world — our foreign policy should reflect our core values, it should be applied consistently, and the President should forsake convenience by refusing to make policy exceptions for allied countries with values that are antithetical to ours.

On the domestic policy front, I recommend that the President needs to seriously work on his Ds and Es, and drop those polarizing Gs. Thus, the President has to first and foremost deal with the troublesome Ds — by reducing the massive budget and trade deficits, and by boosting the value of the dollar. He simultaneously needs to work with both parties in Congress to reach a consensus on the critical Es — education, the environment, and energy policy. Finally, the President must stop politicizing those infamous Gs — god, guns, and gays — the election is over, he won, and it’s time to show some grace!

The Bush Diaries is being published by iUniverse and will be available online at www.amazon.com just in time to round off this great summer.

Without Mark Felt "our long national nightmare" would be still going on!

Watergate was a criminal conspiracy, exposed in large part by The Washington Post, which brought down a Republican president. Whitewater was a shady deal, conflated to some extent by the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal, which unfairly tormented a Democratic president. So when the WSJ editorial page compares the two in “Deep Throat's Legacy”, the only commonality that I see is the “water” part. While the Watergate investigation opened the floodgates to expose real corruption, the Whitewater probe closed the dikes due to a drought of valid information. The WSJ editors conclude that “the Fourth Estate's first duty is to report the facts” — advice that they should have followed back in the 1990s when they were obsessing over Whitewater. By continuously churning Whitewater, they managed to create a lot of turbulence and no dirt really settled. Per the old adage, they should have known that “still waters run deep”.

Speaking of deep, Washington has been agog in the past couple of days with the outing of “Deep Throat” after 33 years under cover. This is a truly remarkable story in a number of ways, since it highlights:

* The irony of Woodward and Bernstein preserving a secret for three decades in a town that they seduced for gobs of information over three tumultuous years (1972-74) to unravel a corrupt presidency. Undoubtedly, along with Ben Bradlee, they have helped restore some integrity to journalism, which has taken a pounding in the past few years with the problems at The New York Times and USA Today.

* The dilemma for conservatives now vilifying W. Mark Felt, since he was pardoned by their hero, Ronald Reagan — albeit in a separate case. Nevertheless, President Reagan’s statement, while granting a pardon in 1981 to FBI agents Mark Felt and Edward Miller, praised “their good-faith belief that their actions were necessary to preserve the security interests of our country” and also said that they were “two men who acted on high principle”.

* The indispensable value of one’s conscience in prodding one to do the right thing, irrespective of one’s personal motives, as long as one determines that there are tangible benefits to organization, society, government, etc. in the long run.

Finally, one has to wonder, without Deep Throat how would “our long national nightmare” have ended? Here’s one scenario – Nixon would have completed his second term, Ford would have then probably beaten Carter in 1976, but Ford would have then lost to Mondale in 1980, Reagan would have been too old to run in 1984, so Mondale would have won a second term by beating Bush Sr. instead, Clinton would have defeated Dole in 1988 (instead of 1996), but Clinton would have lost a second term to Perot in 1992 – both, Republicans and Democrats, must agree that without W. Mark Felt "our long national nightmare" would be still going on!