Selective, unfair, naive, banal

One fallout of the severe political polarisation of the United States is the severely politically polarised book, such as this one.

What We’ve Lost
Graydon Carter
Little Brown
2004
Politics
Pages: 352
Price: £ 12.99
ISBN: 0374288925

One fallout of the severe political polarisation of the United States is the severely politically polarised book. One can fill a shelf with the anti-George W. Bush books, a library with the volumes spewing out of the US denouncing left-liberal policies and personalities and the return fire coming from the anti-conservative ranks.

HT Image

These books have common characteristics. One, they tend to be so blatantly biased that they appeal only to the converted. No real truth-seeker touches them with a lie detector. Two, because they read like biblical scripture minus divine flourish they are mind-numbingly boring.

Carter is the ultra-liberal editor of Vanity Fair and he doesn’t like Bush. So he and his staff have compiled everything they find disagreeable about the US president in 350-pages.

Carter doesn’t like Bush because he believes the president used 9/11 to finish a personal grudge against Saddam Hussein. He’s angry at Bush’s curbs on civil liberties, his weakening of environmental laws, his cuts in welfare spending and rises in tax breaks for the rich. He hates the right wing-judges Bush appoints and the way he mangles English.

Many of his criticisms are probably sound. The problem is, one can’t be sure. Here’s why:

Carter is selective. Yes, Bush withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol. But somehow there is no mention that the US Senate voted 89-0 against Kyoto in its present form.

Carter is unfair. He goes through the humungous Pentagon budget and catalogues awful cases of waste. But every defence budget since the US civil war has financial flab. Much of this criticism was equally valid during the Bill Clinton years.

Carter is naive. Yes, Bush cut welfare spending. But that’s been so central to the Republican platform for so long it would be almost unethical for Bush not to do so.

Finally, Carter is banal. Do you really need to know the name of the one El Salvadoran soldier killed in Iraq or the number of times of Bush used “terrorism” versus “environment” in his State of the Union addresses? The sheer amount of padding with trivia is Carter’s worst sin, doubly so for a man who runs the impeccably-scripted Vanity Fair.