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The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush's America | 
 enlarge | Author: Frank Rich
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
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Rating:  144 reviews
Sales Rank: 13794
Format: Bargain Price
Media: Paperback
Pages: 352
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.3 x 0.9
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.931
ASIN: B0014EAWX6
Publication Date: August 28, 2007
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Product Description
New York Times columnist Frank Rich reviews the trajectory of fictions spun by the Bush administration from 9/11 to Hurricane Katrina, revealing the most brilliant spin campaign ever conducted.
Unabridged CDs - 8 CDs, 10 hours
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| Customer Reviews: Read 139 more reviews...
 Painful insight from America's best columnist September 20, 2006
J. A Magill (Sacramento, CA USA)
353 out of 441 found this review helpful
When Frank Rich sits at his type writer people in the White House shudder. And with good reason, for the New York Times columnist skewers them every Sunday with a combination of able research and wry wit. People taking pleasure in his Sunday columns will delight in this book. Those who detest him will likely have an aneurysm. Already, as can be seen among the reviews for this book, GOP attacks have either taken out their long knives to stab or tried to dismiss Rich as just another Bush Hater.
Such ad hominem attacks fail to reply to the care with which Rich approaches the topic or the strength of his argument. Seeing the Bush White House at its heart as arrogant and disdaining the constraints of tradition and law, the book traces a parade of failures and attempts to explain how time and again the administration can distract the American people from reality. In this Rich saves his greatest venom for his own peers in the media in general and at his own paper in particular. Why did they not challenge the White House when it made charges, often demonstrably false, such as Dick Cheney's recent claims never to have claimed Saddam was involved in 9/11? How did they give the government a pass on Afghanistan even as the US began shifting troops to Iraq leaving that country on the precipice of falling back into the hands of the Taliban? Remember how every prisoner at Gunatanamo was "the worst of the worst," and only now we know many innocent people remain in a legal limbo, turned over by bounty hunters in Pakistan to the US military, and even now remaining in captivity because the White House is loath to admit its mistake? Or how come the media does not question why terrorists become the most active in the summer and fall of even years?
At its heart, Rich blames the media's desire for access, its disinterest in analysis, and its fear of being painted as not patriotic. Since 9/11 the White House has succeeded in silencing those who offer any competing narrative to its own (remember Bill Maher's suggestion that we're deluding ourselves if we think cowards fly airplanes into buildings?) more interested in controlling the story than winning the war. As with the excellent history of Iraq "Fiasco" Bush partisans will not give this work a read, nor even consider the possibility of fault, let alone bad intentions. Even honorable men who shed blood in war for the country such as Senator's McCain, Graham, and Warner, find themselves under attack because disagreement for many of my fellow Americans now seems synonymous with betrayal. Those who reflexively revile works such as this one should take a deep breath and hear out his argument. A dose of his rational outrage would be a tonic for us all.
That's Showbiz! September 19, 2006
Panopticonman (Brooklyn, NY USA)
306 out of 390 found this review helpful
In THE GREATEST STORY EVER SOLD, Frank Rich amply proves that in these United States, we no longer have a functioning democracy but instead a taxpayer-funded theatrical enterprise which serves up to an increasingly restless public endless variations of cynical melodrama designed to scare the American people into submission, neutralize opponents, and surreptitiously realize big profits for its investors in the military-industrial-energy complex.
As long-time theater critic at the New York Times, Frank Rich is clearly better suited to seeing though the stagecraft of the Bush administration than the so-called "hard news" reporters like those in the stage-struck White House press corps. Reporters like the New York Times' Judith Miller, for example, who swallowed the Nigerian yellow cake uranium melodrama hook, line and sinker, and credulously fell for one red herring after another.
Hypnotized by their front row access to the White House melodrama and the threat of losing it, Rich argues that hard news reporters were played for suckers in the run up to the war by the morality play presidency of George W. Bush. The White House press corps became invested in the story, Rich argues, perpetuating the story line and profiting from it in the form of a rapt readership, and high ratings. The apocalyptic story line of a smoking gun that would become a mushroom cloud was just too sensational to pass up.
Rich wrote in an editorial a week before he went on sabbatical to write his book: "The highest priority for the Karl Rove-driven presidency is...to preserve its own power at all costs. With this gang, political victory and the propaganda needed to secure it always trump principles, even conservative principles, let alone the truth. Whenever the White House most vociferously attacks the press, you can be sure its No. 1 motive is to deflect attention from embarrassing revelations about its incompetence and failures."
As much as I am grateful for Rich's book and his columns -- one of the last voices, along with Paul Krugman's, of the Times' once-proud bourgeoisie brownstone liberal tradition -- I find myself shaking my head at the notion that the Bush administration might be "embarrassed" by its "incompetence and failures." One can only be embarrassed at incompetence and failure if you believe you have been shown to be incompetent or to have failed. But since this production is designed only to line its investors' pockets with loot, and has been doing so very nicely, there is no reason for embarrassment.
The Bush troupe, cynically directed by Karl Rove, while not capable of embarrassment, is, as Rich points out, very good at sniffing the political winds and sensing what its audience needs. As Rich says, depending on the situation, Rove will put on a new performance to draw attention elsewhere, and/or shine a harsh interrogatory spotlight on those who dare to respond to their latest offering with a sigh, a snort, or a Bronx cheer. Rove is particularly adept at creating villains as foils to an heroic Bush. While it's nothing new -- the divide and conquer melodrama has been big box office for Republicans and conservatives since Joe McCarthy came up with the formula back in the 50s - Rove has refined the stagecraft, sharpened the script into soundbites.
Recall if you will Bush's "inability" to admit to making any mistakes in his Presidency a few years ago under questioning at a White House press conference. Many commentators saw that as an example of Bush's unwillingness to examine a new set of facts, draw new conclusions and make new plans. But, in fact, Bush was playing his role of heroic common man perfectly, "catapulting the propaganda" over the heads of elites to his real audience - those true believers who embrace with all their hearts the Rovian melodrama of the strong, tough hero.
The problem with a steady diet of melodrama, of course, is that after a while the audience begins to lose interest. At some point, as Mr. Bush's poll numbers suggest, the tear-jerking and fear-jerking no longer work. The Manichaean plot becomes ever more apparent and the players are at last revealed as stick figures, as puppets, as empty ciphers in the service of the deus ex machina.
Perhaps even Mr. Bush has at last grown tired of the limited role of cock-sure, tough-talking, God-loving hero, the stock character he and director Rove artfully recycled from movie westerns, dime novels and tall tales: recently Mr. Bush told Brian Williams of NBC that he read "three Shakespeare's" and "The Stranger" during his summer vacation.
The final tragic message of THE GREATEST STORY EVER SOLD is that the curtain on this base melodrama could have come down years ago had only the "reviewers" in the American press corps and the Congress been doing their jobs for the American people. Frank Rich has done his job from the very beginning of this longest running melodrama in American political history. Thankfully, he continues to do so.
If you care about the quality of your freedoms.... September 20, 2006
o dubhthaigh (north rustico, pei, canada)
96 out of 134 found this review helpful
... you owe it to yourself to read this book. By now, it comes as no surprise how and why Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Gonzales and that ho Rice puppeted Pinocchio out as a humble leader bent on restoring America's primacy in the geo-politico-moral world. Problem was, turns out America is equally the villain. Rich's book takes accurate aim at how the press rolled over, how Congress rolled over, how the rubes who constitute the American people rolled over for a crock od [...] that should never have gotten past anybody but for the tax cuts and lollipops that America trades its values for. Shame on you all below the 49th.
I found it no less than fitting that this book arrives the same day as the brilliant biography of I. F. Stone: ALL GOVERNMENTS LIE. Rich is clearly issuing a clarion call among his colleagues to forego the Woodward, Couric and Stahl fetishization with high-level soundbites and question the crap they're being fed by a government with no moral compass bent on self aggrandizement. Stone had many breakthroughs in the course of his career, and perhaps none so damning to the US as blowing the cover on the big lie of the Gulf of Tonkin, a lie that led to the destruction of Viet Nam, the loss of over a million lives, an absolute bonanza for Dow Chemical. Now we have Halliburton and Cheney, but it's the same story. Greed. Propped up by tails wagging the dog: Jessica Lynch never happened.
There is a shopping list that Rich extols that excoriates both this fetid pool of tyrants and the lame press that has foresaken its backbone in order to become a star on TV. It's sad that America's vaunted treasure of Freedom of the Press has become fodder for the cult of personality, but it has, and Americans pursue enlightend entitlement far more passioantely than their so called Bill of Rights. This book is a slap to any and all buying into the chicanery fobbed off on a stupid electorate. Another in a series of wake up calls for the Roman Empire. One gets the feeling though, that the Ynaks and Rebs like their Nero country-western style.
Interesting, but Disappointingly Superficial (by Someone Who Actually Read the Book) September 22, 2006
Steve Koss (New York, NY United States)
88 out of 102 found this review helpful
Unlike the obvious majority of one-star "reviewers" of THE GREATEST STORY EVER SOLD (who have probably never read a book containing more than fifty words to a page), I read and thoroughly enjoyed Frank Rich's story of the Bush II Administration's use of half-truths, misdirection, staging of alternate realities, and general truthiness to promote a disuniting agenda and hide its astonishing incompetence. As a long-time drama critic turned weekly op-ed columnist for the New York Times, who better to critique the overweening theatricality of a Presidency predicated on its own supporters' willing suspension of disbelief and acceptance of image and symbols over content and truth?
Mr. Rich's approach in THE GREATEST STORY EVER SOLD is disarmingly simple - retell the chronological story of the Bush II Presidency, focusing on the manner in which the Administration presented and sold its case to the American public. What emerges, of course, is a pattern of deceptions and staged events that have resulted in a failed Presidency (with approval ratings rivaling those of Nixon after Watergate), a country more polarized than ever, and a lower American standing in the world than at any time in our history. What also emerges, however, is a portrait of the mainstream media that for far too long acted as the President's lapdog, cowed by the aftershocks of 9/11 ("watch what you say!"), panic-stricken over the notion of seeming traitorous simply by asking a question, and fawning obsequiously over the Bush Administration out of fear of losing their vaunted access (failing to recognize the irony of their being used as tools of the Administration's propaganda program).
Mr. Rich chronicles the Bush Administration's story from 9/11 to Katrina in great detail, hitting all the well-known low spots (aluminum tubes, uranium from Niger, Valerie Plame, WMD's, shock and awe, embedded reporters, Jessica Lynch, Mission Accomplished, "Kenny Boy" Lay, Jeff (hotmilitarystud.com) Gannon, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, Abu Ghraib, Pat Tillman, Cindy Sheehan, Michael (heckuva job) Brown, etc.) and a few less publicized ones. The entire recap plays like the political equivalent of a year-ending "Top 100 Musical Hits" show, bringing back lots of (mostly bad) memories and connecting the dots across the first five or six years of George Bush's Presidency.
This chronological retelling is both a strength and a weakness in Rich's book - positive in its provision of perspective and recognition of patterns of failed behavior and outright disregard for all but a privileged few Americans, negative in being a mile wide but only an inch deep in its analysis. Rich is largely content to be a chronicler of events, a gatherer, sorter, and reporter of information already on the public record. He unearths nothing new in his story, demonstrates no inclination to interview the principals in these events, and offers precious little analysis or commentary of his own. Thus, for example, we revisit the pathetically premature and pompous Top Gun scene of Mission Accomplished (and the Administration's hilariously inept revisionist efforts to explain the "true meaning" of that sign), but we learn next to nothing from behind the scenes about how it was staged. This pattern of reporting the superficial, publicly-known aspects of each event haunts the full length of the book, making it sound at times more like an extended movie review than an analytical recap of actual current events. If anything, THE GREATEST STORY EVER SOLD proves convincingly that Mr. Rich does not have a reporter's chops.
In the final chapter, Mr. Rich offers his conjectures as to why the Bush/Cheney/Rove Administration engaged in such massive deception to initiate its war of choice in Iraq. He comes down unconvincingly on the side of purely political motivations, offering no new evidence for his reasons and conveniently ignoring the geopolitics of (and the Bush family's business connections to) Middle Eastern oil. All that having been said, THE GREATEST STORY EVER SOLD is nevertheless a worthwhile read, if only to put the first five years of the 21st Century - and the brazen truthiness of the Bush II Administration -- into perspective. For those who don't follow these stories closely, the full picture Mr. Rich paints will be eye-opening, perhaps even shocking in its scope and audacity. History will judge the merits of the Presidency, the media, and the American people of this era and likely find them all sadly wanting. It may well also find that they suffered collectively from the travails encapsulated in a hoary Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times." Interesting, indeed.
On a final note, it is disappointing in the extreme that books like Frank Rich's are consistently swamped with personal attacks and angry, content-free, Limbaugh-like diatribes by so many chromosomally-deficient knuckle-draggers. Something is sorely missing in these poor right-wingers' lives that they have so little else to do but post trashy commentary from their trailer parks about books they've never seen, let alone read. Life out there in Kansas and the rest of blue state Jesusland must truly be a tortured trial.
Bush's Deceptive Practices Mimic Fidel Castro's Good Ol Tricks September 21, 2006
Andrew J. Rodriguez (Golden, Colorado)
86 out of 113 found this review helpful
I left Cuba as a teenager during the early sixties (read my memoir,"Adios, Havana".) Fidel's tactics to distract the public's attention from politically explosive issues in those days are the same as those utilized by the Bush Administration to cover up its countless blunders and to manipulate public opinion. "The Greatest Story Ever Sold" reminds me of the days when most Havana's newspaper headlines read like this: "Yankee Invasion Inevitable." At that, Castro would mobilize his militia, his tanks and his Migs to deviate our concerns from meaningful issues into a generalized state of anxiety. Most Cubans swallowed the pill over and over; 'Oh, my god, the Yankees are coming!' While we concentrated in the phony invasion, Mr. Castro used his underhanded tricks to distract our minds and implement communism little by little until the knot was too tight to undo. Now that the tyrant is about to die, we're anxious to see him meet his maker in hell. Unfortunately, most Americans are still too naive to realize that politics is war without bloodshed and US citizens we are the spoils of that war. Bush knows it, Clinton knew it and whoever gets elected in 2008 will. These Machiavelian shenanigans have been too damn overused throughout history and it is about time we recognize the fraud . Wake up, America! We still have time.
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