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Title: The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina
ISBN: 159420098X
Author:
Frank Rich
Publicate Date: 2006-09-19
Publish: 2006-09-19
List Price: $25.95
Average Customer Rating: 4.0
Format: Hardcover
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $1.69
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1: DECLINE AND FALL IN PRICE OF THIS BOOK
IT LOOKS LIKE AMAZON WILL BE GIVING THIS BOOK AWAY SOON. IT'S DOWN TO $4.49. YOU COULD NOT PAY ME TO READ IT. WELL, MAYBE FOR $100.00 I MIGHT, AND THEN I WOULD BURN IT.
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2: The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush's America
If you disagree with the Iraq War and the past 8 years of Bush policy, this is the book for you. Frank Rich does an excellent job of presenting the stagecraft and spin used in the administration's efforts to "sell" the war. Easy reading.
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3: Much already known and a few things I didn't know.
This for me was a case of the cover caught my eye. I didn't know who was Frank Rich and will confess to thinking he was associated with the Bush team in some fashion.
A large portion of the information was known by to me through various sources. The biggest lesson for me was the level of creating alertnate realities and the use of "infoganda" by the Bush Administration. I knew of it but did not know have far it went. I knew of the fake reporters but I didn't grasp the aspects of creating alternate viewpoints to distract the truth.
There are many examples giving alternate realities. Staging speeches such as after Katrina where generators were set up to give the appearance of power restored to New Orleans which in turn where disabled after the speech. Ken "kenny boy" Lay and Micheael "brownie" Brown where it was implied Bush really didn't know them after the fall from grace.
What is surprising is the level of character assassination that went on; be it people or the press. If you can't fight the truth, attack the speaker. They did it well as it basically caused the Press as Rich calls it to "Jump the Shark" during these times. Hard questions were not asked otherwise, you may appear anti-American, etc.
We see this affects discussion today. Even in the last election, it was suggested to ask hard questions of Sarah Palin would get you labeled as sexist.
There is a chronology at the end of the book. It's interesting to degree depending on your knowledge of things. Some may argue that it's superficial and in some cases it is but it still offers proof rather then regurgitating the opinions of the practitioners of infotainment.
Overall this is not a detailed book. For example, stuff like the Bush family ties to Middle Eastern Oil is missing. However, I would not dismiss the book for it would probably take a few books to give a through coverage of this Presidency.
In time we will see the effects of this President. Many avenues of information will be needed and books such as this will be needed give consideration from all angles.
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4: A Cultural View of the Iraq War
This book is unique among the already vast literature on the Iraq War. It is authored by Frank Rich who was the New York Times theater critic before he became one of the paper's prominent op-ed writers. He is not a war correspondent but rather a social critic.
The title of the book reflects a social critic's approach. It focuses not on the war front but on how the Bush administration cynically sold the public on an unnecessary, "elective" war. If you have read Rich's columns in the past you will have read much of what is in this book. This book, however, ties all of the individual columns into a compelling narrative.
Rich meticulously documents the lies, distortions, and deception that led a guileless public to support a war that had nothing to do with the attacks on 9/11. The most valuable part of the book, in my view, is the timeline set forth at the end of the narrative. It factually documents what the administration knew privately and what their spokesman, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, Cheney, and Bush were saying publicly.
It is sickening to see an administration continually changing its story to fit the facts. It is revolting to see, at best, a lazy New York Times reporter like Judith Miller reporting "facts" about WMD that were being fed to her by Scooter Libby. It is sad to see Bob Woodward of Watergate fame have his journalistic credibility badly compromised because of his highly-trumpeted and cherished access to powerful people. His refusal to admit that he was the used rather than the user is damning.
It is mind-numbing to see how the administration would leak phony information to a reporter like Judith Miller and then cite its own anonymous leak as having been "reported by The New York Times." Willing media stooges are exposed throughout this book and Rich shows how much more credulous they were than the public; how access to power was more important than facts.
Gallup polls reflected greater public skepticism about an invasion of Iraq than the media. The media "watch-dog" was unquestioningly spreading administration lies about aluminum tubes, mobile biological labs, and other scare-mongering stories like smoking gun mushroom clouds. The media was complicit in all the lying leading up to the war.
What is most incredible is that George W. Bush won re-election in 2004. Rich shows that so many of those lies about nuclear and WMD programs were debunked soon after the invasion in March 2003. According to Rich, just as it did with the invasion of Iraq, the Bush cabal won re-election by creating its own reality for the public, separate and apart from actual fact. And they were successful. They produced a separate reality that made a rich kid draft dodger into a top gun hero and a Vietnam War hero into a coward and a traitor.
Rich shows how Hurricane Katrina brought down the curtain on the whole Bush show in August 2005. There was too much press access to hide the kind of mistakes that were hidden during the height of the Iraqi insurgency. His favorability numbers, so deeply coveted by a man who never looked at polls (another lie) would never recover from pictures of Americans standing on their roofs begging to be rescued.
It is an Orwellian experience to see the exculpatory remark "I don't think anybody could have predicted" made by Condoleeza Rice about the 9/11 attacks in May 2002 juxtaposed against President Bush's "I don't think anyone could have anticipated" the breech of the levees caused by Hurricane Katrina on the same page. But there it is in this book. Rich highlights the irony of those parallel lies and how they strikingly symbolize the damage this administration has done to America; both abroad and at home. It is hard to keep your lies straight when you lie so much.
Few get off easily in this book; not the administration, not the media, not the public. Frank Rich is a social critic first of all. The Bush administration is the chief malefactor in this dreadful fiction turned reality. The media, though, was passive and lazy in its reporting. The majority of the American public was unable to tell the difference between a TV reality show and the true reality in Iraq exposed after the invasion. This was shown by the large number of Americans who still believed there was a connection between 9/11 and Iraq.
Yet Rich cannot answer the basic question of the Iraq War. Why in the world did we invade Iraq? There have been myriad "explanations" These range from a real belief that Iraq had WMD, to Saddam's attempt to kill Bush's father. Not even members of the Bush administration seem to agree. Rich concludes that we will probably never know.
A credible case can be made that several powerful people and institutions with different rationales for invading Iraq all converged thanks to a weak and incurious president. Bush, as Rich asserts in his introduction, is a rich kid draft dodger who wanted to show how "tough" he was; a first class chickenhawk.
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5: The Road That Ran Off The Cliff
"The Greatest Story Ever Sold," by Frank Rich, describes major events that occurred in the United States between 2000 and 2006, the Bush Administration's reaction to them, the Bush Administration's creation of events, the reaction of the press to the Administration, and the people's reaction then and at the time of publishing to both the Administration and the press. While many people can site the events and their versions of them - certainly now, possibly at the time - it is helpful to have this recent history placed in a coherent manner to see the cause and effect of the Administration's actions.
Rich, an op-ed columnist, drama critic and a writer about culture and politics, has used his insight in all of these areas to describe the road of events that has now left us over $10 trillionn in debt, fighting two foreign wars, American cities drowned, and actual, treasonable, impeachable scandals that have taken place in the Administration. As another reviewer pointed out, there are no new revelations in this book, but I'm not sure that there was ever meant to be: the book can be another expos?? of new audacities of the Bush Administration, or it can simply be a logical, factual, orderly statement of facts and opinions of what has happened. I say "opinion" because, for example, when Valerie Plame was revealed to be employed by the CIA, a prevalent theory for this treasonable act to be made was as revenge for her husband's editorial being printed in the paper. Rich argues that her CIA connection was because the Administration was concerned that it would expose them for lying the U.S. into war with Iraq. Both seem plausible, but there is a difference in the reason behind Plame's being named a CIA agent.
All in all, it is an interesting, valuable book, recommended to those who want to view how this country went from where it was in the 1990s to where it is today - like driving on a country road to going over the mountainside. The one, small dissonant note that I have with Rich's writing is that sometimes the comparisons with the facts and movies/stage/culture tended to get a little thick. But away from that, if you want to know the road that we traveled then and are going on now, read this book.
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