Cohen Injects the Iraq War Into Bush's Reading List

It seems that Bush isn't the dummy that the press has made him out to be. The press, however, doesn't seem especially happy about that fact.

It is awfully late in the day for Rove -- and, presumably, Bush -- to assert the president's intellectual bona fides. Now feeling the hot breath of history, they are dropping the good ol' boy persona and picking up the ol' bifocals one. But the books themselves reveal -- actually, confirm -- something about Bush that maybe Rove did not intend. They are not the reading of a widely read man, but instead the books of a man who seeks -- and sees -- vindication in every page. Bush has always been the captive of fixed ideas. His books just support that.

The list Rove provides is long, but it is narrow. It lacks whole shelves of books on how and why the Iraq war was a mistake, one that metastasized into a debacle. Absent is Rajiv Chandrasekaran's "Imperial Life in the Emerald City," Tom Ricks's "Fiasco," George Packer's "The Assassins' Gate" or, on a related topic, Jane Mayer's "The Dark Side" about "extraordinary rendition" and other riffs on the Constitution. Absent too is Barton Gellman's "Angler," about Dick Cheney, the waterboarder in chief.

Why the hell would Bush want to read some book called Fiasco about his handling of the Iraq War. I mean he is probably aware that the Reconstruction period is Iraq was bungled and why does he need some guy named Tom Ricks to tell him that. I mean Bush read the daily reports and was privy to the Top Secret stuff that a reporter like Ricks can only dream of. What good would it be to read some retread like that?

Also I don't understand how reading some liberal crap about the "failure" in Iraq will suddenly make a broad reader out of someone. I mean watching a Song for Ellah, Rendition, and Stop-Loss doesn't suddenly make a person into a broad movie watcher.

Cohen, however, could have suggested a nice list of books that Bush would have enjoyed upon looking at his book list. But instead he goes back to the "Iraq is a fiasco let's run away" attitude that infected the Left in 2006. Cohen also could have suggested some "progressive" books that Bush may have enjoyed. I don't know what that would be but I'm sure Cohen knows them. Instead he just dredges up the tired old "Iraq War is a Failure" pablum.

In any case it was cool to have a book that I read Vienna 1814 be on the Presidential Reading List. That book was very entertaining and really gave a nice overview about the "Concert of Vienna" that followed the Napoleonic Wars. Also it shows that Bill Clinton wasn't the only powerful man that got a little side action since just about everyone there had multiple mistresses sometimes at the same time. I hope that Bush enjoyed the book as much as I did.