http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/7/1/95048/45701
A Tragic Legacy
How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency
By Glenn Greenwald
Crown Publishers
New York, 2007
.... all of the seemingly disparate component parts and disconnected
events of the Bush administration have a common origin.
They all are, to varying degrees, outgrowths of the president's core
view that the world can be understood as an overarching conflict
between the forces of Good and Evil, and that America is "called upon"
to defend the former from the latter. That view finds a corresponding
expression for the president on the personal level, where the moral
and religious duty of the individual is to divine God's will (the
Good) and to act in accordance with it.
By definition, this premise demands the identification of Evil, which
is the enemy-an enemy that is pure in its Evil and that, by its
nature, cannot be engaged, offered compromises, negotiated with,
understood, managed, contained, or ignored. It can only be attacked,
hated, and destroyed.
When expressed and implemented as a governing philosophy, this belief
in the centrality of Good vs. Evil results not in an effort to limit
government power, but rather to expand it drastically, both
domestically and abroad, in order to accumulate power in service of
the battle against (perceived) Evil and to impose (perceptions of)
Good. Such a philosophy is centrally predicated on the certainty that
government leaders can divine God's will-not with regard to specific
issues and policies but in a generalized moral sense-and can therefore
confidently enlist and expand the awesome power of the American
government in service to universal moral dictates. As a political
philosophy, it is therefore far from "conservative." Rather, it is
messianic, evangelical, and Manichean.
With ruthless clarity and bone-chilling analysis, Glenn Greenwald's A
Tragic Legacy takes readers on a tour of the simplistic black-and-
white world that Bush has created over the past six years-a world
where all situations are reduced to a nightmare cartoon of pure Good
and pure Evil, where military solutions are the only solutions, where
any call for calm consideration is equated with backing the forces of
darkness.
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