My excerpts:Rich writes what is surely American journalism's smartest and most original newspaper column
He also has a genuine relish for popular culture and has almost single-handedly made the word "truthiness," first coined by Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert, an indispensable political term of art. As Rich defines it, "truthiness" describes a situation in which it doesn't matter whether something is true: "What matters most is whether a story can be sold as true, preferably on television."
That describes precisely the stories George W. Bush and his surrogates told the American people to induce them to support war in Iraq, and Rich lays out these evasions, exaggerations and outright lies in "The Greatest Story Ever Sold."
According to Rutten, Rich recently told an interviewer:
There's certainly tremendous overlap, but the fact is, when you're writing a column, you don't see the larger picture. I really wanted to write a narrative more than an argument. In the run-up to the war in Iraq, a lot of stuff was hiding in plain sight. Some of it I saw at the time, some of it I didn't.Rutten continues by saying that the book includes,
All of the stuff that counts . . . marshaled in a narrative that unfolds with the cadence of a well-paced newspaper column. There's also a shrewdly observed and reasoned explanation of the motives behind all this horrifically destructive deceit — and Rich is clear in his belief that one of the casualties of the ill-considered war in Iraq has been the real war on real terrorism, which is as serious and avoidable as a fight can be.
Dick Cheney, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Paul D. Wolfowitz and the rest of the neoconservatives who came to Washington as intellectual props for a stunningly ill-prepared and "incurious" president brought with them an ideological belief that the Middle East, starting with Iraq, needed to be remade. Karl Rove, Bush's political prop, brought with him a single-minded loyalty and an unparalleled mastery of campaign — which is to say, media — technology. Those qualities converged in the run-up to the first midterm elections following Sept. 11 and the failed attempt to apprehend Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.
As Rich puts it:
For Rove and Bush to get what they wanted most, slam dunk midterm election victories, and for Libby and Cheney to get what they wanted most, a war in Iraq for ideological reasons that predated 9/11, their real whys for going to war had to be replaced by more saleable ones. We'd go to war instead because there was a direct connection between Saddam and al Qaeda and because Saddam was on the verge of attacking America with nuclear weapons."The story was better than true; it was "truthy."
. . . . If our public conversation still were capable of making any distinctions but partisan ones, the sheer moral force of Rich's argument and the logical weight of his evidence would lay to rest the casual conservative canard that he is, somehow, an avatar of rarified Manhattan liberalism, writing in a language that is foreign west of the Hudson. As this book so clearly demonstrates, the very heart of his project as a writer and public intellectual is nothing fancier than a rugged old American belief that facts matter and a fierce old American resentment at being conned.
It's hard to imagine values more traditional. It was, after all, a Republican president from the heartland who once mused,
You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.
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