NY Times Book Review: 'American Dynasty': Family Lies (Guess Who?)

[NashVegas]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/18/books/review/18ORESKET.html

If Howard Dean (or any other Democrat) is elected president of the United States this year, he (or she) will owe a debt of gratitude to Kevin Phillips. This may seem improbable. Phillips is, of course, legendary for his blueprint of Republican hegemony, ''The Emerging Republican Majority,'' published in 1969.

...

'I didn't like the Bushes when I was involved in G.O.P. politics before their two presidencies,'' he acknowledges at the end of his latest book. ''And now I better understand why.'' He is referring to the 333 preceding pages of ''American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush,'' a compendium of evils that he says have been handed down for four generations in the Bush family.

The book makes two basic and interlocking arguments. The first is that the United States has entered a period of what Phillips calls dynastic politics, in which the spouses and offspring of political figures are picking up where their relatives left off, to the detriment of democracy. The second is that the most important example of this phenomenon is not the Kennedys but the Bushes, who, beginning with George W. Bush's great-grandfathers, Samuel P. Bush and George H. Walker, assembled wealth and power by exploiting ties to Wall Street, arms merchants, the American intelligence apparatus and foreign dictators including Hitler. That wealth and power, and those connections, are why Bush is president today, Phillips says, and why his policies are what they are. Phillips finds the family fingerprints on everything from Bush's pursuit of Saddam Hussein to his leanings toward the energy industry, which, in the web Phillips weaves, are also related to each other.

There's been so much publicity to the O'Neill book, this one kinda flew under my radar.

[leetrisck]

1. I read this one first and then

O'Neill's book. Why can't American's see what this crime family has taken from this country and our people. They really are an evil empire. It appears to me that we have had a government "outside the government" for many years.

[nostamj]

2. Prescott Bush financed Nixon's first campaign

nuff said?

every evil thing in American politics and foreign policy for the past 100+ years can be directly traced to the BFEE

esp. the sub-human spawn of Barbara Bush