MB Civic

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/books/review/Senior.t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=books&pagewanted=print

Pretensions to Empire: Notes on the Criminal Folly of the Bush Administration, by Lewis H. Lapham

How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime, by Sidney Blumenthal

“Lewis Lapham and Sidney Blumenthal really, really dislike George W. Bush. Lapham compares the administration to a crime syndicate; Blumenthal calls Wolfowitz ‘the neoconservative Robespierre.'” And the reviewer, New York Magazine editor Jennifer Senior, takes them both to task for simply “heckling” rather than “exploring contradictions, struggling with ideas , maybe even proposing suggestions.” However, this is disingenuous, since both writers are “observers,” and it is not specific role to “explore…struggle…or propose.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/books/review/Wooldridge.t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege, by Damon Linker

“The theocons started as left-wing radicals, but found a home in the bosom of the conservative establishment.”

“Linker is a disillusioned theocon…but his tone is admirably restrained, dispassionate and scholarly…The result, for anyone who wants to understand the growing public role of American religion, is a book to reckon with…The best passages in the book deal with a schizophrenia that has been demonizing ‘the people’ when they vote for Bill Clinton and sanctifying them when they vote for George W. Bush. ‘This is the permanent theocon dynamic,’ Linker writes, ‘hurtling wildly from theological affirmation of the country to theocratic denunciation and back again.'” However, the reviewer claims, “In the end, the theocons are just too eccentric to exercise the sort of influence on America that Linker ascribes to them.”