By: The Book Standard In the forthcoming "The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina" (September, Penguin Press), a scathing rebuke of the current administration's definition of "truth," New York Times columnist Frank Rich examines the propaganda misinformation of the Bush era.
Rich recently returned to his Sunday column after taking a leave of absence to finish the book.
Though it was a sequence of events that led to Rich's frustration, he notes the war in Iraq as the epitome of all of the administration's shortcomings: "Placing a higher priority on partisan politics than the nation's welfare, lazy and poor planning, public relations as a substitute for policy, arrogance, unilateralism, an inability to admit or correct mistakes: the same themes recur again and again," he writes.
Rich does, however, reserve a measure of respect for the method behind the madness, while shunning the insanity itself. Beyond the White House's policy, he says, "is also a fascinating narrative: the fictional story they rolled out, quite brilliantly at times, that sold the nation on a war against an enemy that did not attack us on 9/11."
The Democrats' "tardy, timid and laughably inarticulate" response has perturbed him, but not nearly as much as the actions of the Republican administration: "The White House ... sold a war of choice to the American people on fictitious grounds and with disastrous results that will continue to play out on many fronts for years to come," he writes.
The former Times theatre critic compares the administration's "hunger for big, spectacular, gaudy productions that end up being hollow distractions" to "The Phantom of the Opera," albeit "without the songs."
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