The Greatest Story Ever Sold

It's a daunting task to maintain a tone of incredulity throughout eight CDs of condemnation and outrage without finally sounding insufferably strident. But Grover Gardner pulls it off, and does so without, incredibly, disappearing into a monotone of dispassion. No, Gardner, never deprives his reading of irony and sting, but he also doesn't try to artificially juice up the material. There's no need, of course. NEW YORK TIMES columnist Frank Rich is plenty exercised himself in this scorching dismantling of the Bush administration, which he exposes for willful deceit in its pursuit of war, incompetence in virtually every arena it enters, and a cynicism and malice that are hard for Rich to imagine have had their equal in American history. M.O. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

Starred review from July 24, 2006
This blistering j'accuse
has vitriol to spare for George Bush—calling him a "spoiled brat" and "blowhard"—and his policies, but its main target is the PR machinery that promoted those policies to the American people. New York Times
columnist Rich revisits nearly every Bush administration publicity gambit, including Iraqi WMD claims, Bush's "Mission Accomplished" triumph, the Swift-boating of John Kerry and the writing of fake prowar letters-to-the-editor from soldiers. He uncovers nothing new, but his meticulously researched recap-cum-debunking—complete with appended 80-page time line comparing administration spin to actual events—builds a comprehensive picture of a White House propaganda campaign to bamboozle the public, smear critics, camouflage policy disasters and win the 2002 and 2004 elections through trumped-up security anxieties. Along the way, he pillories a sycophantic media (Bob Woodward gets spanked hard), spineless Democrats and an infotainment culture that happily accommodates the Bush administration's erasure of the line between reality and fiction. Sometimes Rich's critique of Republican politics as cynical image-manipulation goes overboard, as in his "wag the dog" theory of the Iraq war as a Karl Rove electoral maneuver; more often, though, it's on target. The result is a caustic, hard-hitting indictment of the Bush administration, timed to make a splash in the upcoming election campaign.