"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.