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Reading • Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency

Book Digest Like many right-thinking Americans, I have been sporting a 1-21-09 sticker on my front bumper for a few years. That date, enlightened citizens will acknowledge, is the last date of the Bush/Cheney presidency—an administration that has more than its share of tell-all tomes and Bob Woodward faux exposés. Barton Gellman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning (for his series of articles on Dick Cheney) Washington Post reporter has produced a revealing explication and implicit indictment of the unprecedented usurpation by the formidably secretive assistant president, “super Chief of Staff,” and Torquemado of conservative orthodoxy that lays many of the accomplishments of the last Bush regime at his feet. Such indictments include: misleading Congress on WMDs, keeping the U.S. out of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, and failing to monitor and correctly assess North Korea and Iran nuclear programs—to name but a few. The criminal depredations of Mr. Cheney—as far as I know lying to Congress is a crime, right?—make for interesting reading into the inner workings of what Tom Frank calls The Wrecking Crew.

But though I am no fan of the bombastic filmmaking of Oliver Stone (one good film, El Salvador, to his credit), I am looking forward to his movie W as a fitting assessment of the dismal Bush/Cheney years. —Robert Birnbaum, Sep. 29, 2008

» Read an excerpt from Angler

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