Glenn Greenwald’s new book is now available for pre-order. The book is called A Tragic Legacy – How a Good Vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency. Anyone who’s ever read Greenwald’s fantastic blog knows that he’s one of the sharpest critics of the Bush Administration, and this book appears to be aimed right at the heart of why this band of fools has done so much damage to the country. From his post today:
The central purpose of the book is to examine what has happened to the United States for the last six years under the Bush presidency. That is the “Bush legacy” — our national character and national identity have been fundamentally degraded, our moral standing and credibility in the world eroded to previously unthinkable depths, our government engaged in the very behavior which, for decades, we have collectively deplored, our trust in America’s governmental and journalistic institutions reduced virtually to zero, and our country placed on a plainly unsustainable course as a result of the militarized, imperial role we are choosing to play in the world.
At the heart of this process lies a binary moralistic view of the world, one which seeks to define every conflict and political challenge, both foreign and domestic, as a battle of Good versus Evil. The crux of this mindset is the continuous identification of an Enemy, one which embodies Evil and which must be stopped, typically destroyed, at all costs. No competing considerations, no rational arguments, no counter-balancing objectives, not even constraints of reality or resources, can compete with the moral imperative of this mission. The mission of destroying Evil trumps all.
In support of this ideology, they’ve been masters of using fear to rally support for their particular causes, regardless of whether that fear is valid. They used 9/11 to get us to fear Saddam and support the most boneheaded military excursion in U.S. history. They use the fear of drugs to fill our jails with minorities and strip away our 4th Amendment rights. They use a fear of “socialism” to try to dismantle government safety nets. They’ve won elections by using the fear of immigrants and gays to rally a nativist base that identifies with the Good vs. Evil mentality. But it’s finally backfiring as the administration is forced to deal with the nuances of the immigration problem and the high percentages of younger voters who are appalled by homophobia and sick of neverending wars. I’m looking forward to seeing how Greenwald put together this narrative.