Vincent Bugliosi ****
The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder
Vanguard Press, 341 pages, $28.95
Gan Golan and Erich Origen ***
Goodnight Bush
Little, Brown and Company, 40 pages, $16.99
The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder recently cracked the Top 20 of The New York Times list with no reviews or media coverage. That basically makes author Vincent Bugliosi the Danielle Steele of polemicists. Steele is popular because she tells overwrought stories like a reliably tawdry machine. Bugliosi is popular because his idea is a potent one, even if the media has so far been incapable of understanding a non-partisan anti-Bush screed.
Given he’s a world famous prosecutor and true-crime writer, trust Bugliosi to at least know a criminal when he sees one and, in his eyes (and, as he argues, by law), Bush is criminally responsible for the deaths of over 4,000 US troops in the Iraq War. Lest you think Bugliosi is reaching for smoking guns and conspiratorial whispers, he builds an argument using only provable evidence and case law. In his (very) cross examination, he zeroes in on the Bush administration’s cherry-picked WMD reports, obstructionism, public admissions of intent on live television and, most disturbing, a cavelier attitude about death that marks Bush as more criminally minded than any other US president this last century.
Bugliosi quotes Eisenhower as saying, “When people speak of preventive war, tell them to go and fight it.” For Lyndon Johnson, reading casualty reports from Vietnam “was like drinking carbolic acid.” Previous administrations may have been forced by circumstance or reluctantly drawn into war, but never as glibly, and with such disingenuous rationale, as Bush. Bugliosi writes: “There is only one translation for [Bush’s] ‘bring ’em on’ remark. ‘Come on and attack us. You kill some of our soldiers, but we’ll kill more of yours.’ How dare this wimpish punk invite the enemy to kill US soldiers?”
Bugliosi is a lawyer, not a pundit, and his mission to prosecute is a serious, if quixotic one. As such, the heart of his argument involves vicarious liability, and whether co-conspirators not present at a crime scene can be guilty of murder. It is, not coincidently, the same principle of law that Bugliosi used to send a previous psychopath to prison: Charles Manson.
Until I received a copy of Gan Golan and Erich Origen’s Goodnight Bush, I was not familiar with the classic children’s book Goodnight Moon, as my parents loved me enough to let me watch TV from infancy on.
For those who are familiar, though, Goodnight Bush will be a spot-on look-alike for Goodnight Moon’s style and rhythms. It would be a great prop in a comedy skit, as it manages to cram eight years of executive misadventure into its few, rectangular pages, but I struggle to name an actual audience for Goodnight Bush. Only fictional Maoist parents would dare traumatize their children with pages like “Goodnight contractor beheading.” And though the use of alphabet blocks on the “Goodnight towers” page is high, if grim, wit, the rest of the book is a shade too simplistic, even for something riffing on a four syllables-a-page model.
Age groups 18 to 85 are recommended to stick with the Bugliosi book.