Anis Shivani: Bush's 'Decision Points' Is A Terrifying Journey Into the Authoritarian Mind

Anis Shivani: Bush's 'Decision Points' Is A Terrifying Journey Into the Authoritarian Mind: "The beauty of the Bush philosophy of governance is that it creates and accelerates those very conditions of stress (radical economic inequality promoted by tax cuts for the wealthy and concomitant cuts in public services for the less well-off) that then provide fertile ground for popular acceptance of measures intended to further worsen conditions for the subject class..."

"..Bush truly was a transformative president, among the rare few, and we deceive ourselves -- as many in the commentariat continue to do, as with Maureen Dowd's light-hearted mockery of him -- if we consider him an anomaly, a rare eruption of a virus that won't repeat itself. This book's ideas will have resonance with a large segment of the population, and a notable number among the elites; we need to study Decision Points (Crown, Nov. 9) seriously, as onerous a task as it may be, if we are to make sense of the perpetual aura of crisis that has enveloped America, and why we seem to be stuck on a self-destructive path.

Decision Points is a classic recipe for a benign dictatorship, a uniquely American form of dictatorship, to be sure -- from its rigid understanding of morality (good versus evil) to its distorted valuation of life (only American lives matter; Bush is not concerned about the loss of civilian life in the countries he attacked) -- that gives comfort to many in a time of economic and cultural stress."