Rating: 
Summary: Bush Rules
Review: As a Canadian, let me say that Dubya is the greatest Prez since WWII. He understands the nature of the battle that Western civilization faces and is ready to do what is necessary to win WWIV.
Podhoretz is an impartial judge and he judges the nature and character of George W. correctly.
God bless America. God bless President Bush.
Rating:
Summary: Bush's success bothers people
Review: The reason for all of the attacks on GWBII is quite simply his success bothers people. A recent poll with IBD indicates that Bush is once again leading Kerry and no doubt will bury Kerry come election time.In Bush Country, author Podhoretz takes all of the lies made about Pres. Bush one by one and explians why they are all baseless. Highly recommended reading for people who want facts, not just baseless opinion.
Rating: 
Summary: Something of the REAL truth?
Review: To Gomer in Homerville, and others . . . there are a lot of people propping up the president and digging dirt and playing nasty with so-called "liberals" (anyone who doesn't get on their knees to GWBush and his gang of fascists). This author is just another Bush slappy, the book written for you 'Gomers' of the world. Why not "open your eyes" and read what a former Bush conservative insider and hatchetman confesses! Read David Brock's - Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative. For starters.
Rating:
Summary: Very informative...
Review: I bought this book along with several others of opposing viewpoints. I suggest reading this book for anyone else who is straddling the fence; the predominant media outlets do not often portray this side of the story.
Rating:
Summary: Read the book, THEN review it
Review: The one-star reviewers don't even seem to have read the dust jacket. It seems that they get tripped up by the very miscalculation and churlishness that Podhoretz describes in this book. This book ably articulates an idea put forward by conservatives, but also by contrarian thinkers on the left such as Christopher Lasch. The liberal "chattering class" is an elite that imagines itself as distinct from, and morally superior to, the conservative majority. Their views on many issues reflect only the interests of this elite rather than the "working families" they claim to uplift. The cultural divide that exists between the deracinated liberal elite and their subjects ensures that liberals never mix with ordinary, unglamorous schlubs. They don't go to NASCAR events, don't listen to country music, and regard the Midwest and South as culturally backward. Incurious and self-absorbed, they don't even seek to understand people who may be more conservative than they are. Even if they do, they idealize the world and fail to simply appreciate people for who they are, and so they never understand why someone might support Bush. I am a libertarian with many misgivings about Bush and his policies. This book was useful in getting a better understanding of how he operates as a politician, and how the pettiness and vanity of his opponents is so often their undoing. I'll probably just hold my nose and vote for the guy.
Rating:
Summary: One Bright Spot
Review: --amid the gloom of war, and the devastation to our economy, international standing, our national comity that Bush Jr has brought to us. And that is, that he has made fools of the entire Podhoretz clan, for all to see.
Rating:
Summary: Only MO's watch ABC News
Review: Only MO's (mental outpatients) watch ABC News. Read this great book instead of watching ABC News. You will be much better off.
Rating:
Summary: Puzzled by Bush Hatred?
Review: I've actually heard George Bush speak in person, and I was very impressed. He struck me as an honest, straight-forward, confident guy. He spoke with conviction on national security issues and ethics-based leadership. By contrast, he was only an average speaker on economic issues. How the heck could he become so viscerally hated by so many people? Similarly, these charges of lying -- if George W. Bush is a liar (like Bill Clinton, for example) I'll eat both my boots. After reading Mr. Podhoretz's book, I understand some of the issues better now. Many liberals (the chattering class, for Mr. Podhoretz) are upset at President Bush's tremendous achievements. He's been absolutely dead on throughout his first term, implementing two large tax cuts, passing impactful educational reform, presiding over a Republican resurgence in both Houses of Congress, waging a successful war against terrorism, and expressing a vision for global freedom that I profoundly hope is possible. So, part of the reason liberals hate President Bush is that he has been a very successful conservative Republican leader. Podhoretz does a good job explaining and debunking the Crazy Liberal Ideas about President Bush (that he's stupid, a liar, etc). What Podhoretz doesn't talk about is that President Bush is THE MAN. You can't look at Bush and not be reminded of some white guy who used to be your boss. I kind of look that way myself. I can't help it, short of entering some male Swan contest in the hope of a radical makeover. America has always had it in for THE MAN (think Jack Black in School of Rock -- "Rock and Roll is all about sticking it the man."). So, President Bush has become easy prey to the Garry Trudeaus of our society, people who create witty and cynical cartoon blurbs sticking it to THE MAN. My message: don't believe the myths about President Bush. Just listen to him, and take his words at face value as his honest opinion. Take his actions as his best efforts in the service of our country. If you do those two things, you'll find it easy to understand each and every statement and action of our sitting President.
Rating:
Summary: Nice Try, Tubby.
Review: Poor, poor John Podhoretz. Wrote his little pamphlet hoping to make a quick buck, just like Mommy wrote her little quickie about Rumsfeld -- only to have the books collide with America's sudden realization that the right wing dream team has become a nightmare. Today, ABC news reports that rather than the work of a few bad apples at Abu Ghraib, Rumsfeld's army has engaged in a massive cover up of the atrocities there. Two NBC reporters have broken through with their stories that they were tortured by the US army. Sy Hersh has broken through with another bombshell revelation, based on sources inside the intelligence community that Rumsfeld and his deputy Charbone commissioned the policies of detainee torture and abuse. Colin Powell is on record that he alerted the Bush White House that torture of prisoners was routine in Iraq. As Sy Hersh quotes a CIA official, as far as Bush pretending he knew nothing of the torture chambers in Iraq, "Some people think you can bull**** anybody." The same is true of poor John Podhoretz, spoon fed his reductive idelogy at his father's corrupt knee. Who does this guy and his right wing cadre think they're kidding? Anybody who would endorse this pathetic apologia for the most wicked, incompetent and anti-democratic Presidency of this or any other era deserves what's coming to him. Speaking of Podhoretz's emablers in this forum, PT Barnum put it best: There's a sucker born every minute.
Rating:
Summary: Sometimes Cowboys Save the Day
Review: What I have noticed about the recent spate of books either praising or damning George Bush is that their collective writing styles are mirror images of the divergent political philosophies of the Republican and Democratic parties. Democratic candidates (John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, Tom Daschle) tend to be smarmy, shrill, and contemptuous of those whose backgrounds are not part of the New York Ivory Urban elite. Republican candidates are more blue collar more folksy in their worldview. In BUSH COUNTRY, John Podhoretz has written the literary equivalent of a call to arms in defense of an American President whom the Democratic Attack Machine mercilessly hammers as a fumbling, bumbling cowboy. Podhoretz divides his book into defenses of allegations that George Bush is a moron, a puppet, a fanatic, a Hitler clone, a financial and military inept, a cowboy, and a liar. As I read BUSH COUNTRY, I compared Podhoretz's thesis with similar charges by the left made in anti-Bush screeds like WHAT LIBERAL MEDIA by Eric Alterman, who tries to deconstruct Bush with the same tired falsehoods that even now John Kerry is slinging. Just as Alterman's book is an incomprehensible mishmash of disagreeable verbal sludge, BUSH COUNTRY, by contrast, pictures George Bush as exactly the sort of man vilified by the New York Urban Elite--one who has core values firmly rooted in the historical Judaeo-Christian ethic of a world view that prizes family, honor, hard work, and security. Not only does Podhoretz do a masterful job of deflecting the left's scurrilous charges of moral ineptitude but he also succeeds in defining the left as a lumpy mess of moral relativists who, like John Kerry, can tell the hard hatted auto workers of Michigan how he prizes his gas guzzling SUV, and then just a few weeks later can tell the Green Peace crowd how he would never own such a mechanical dinosaur. What emerges from BUSH COUNTRY is the portrait of a leader who has his philosophical roots in the Jimmy Stewart MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON film. The very qualities that the left vilifies in Bush Podhoretz succeeds in uplifting a man whose core values are all that stands between this country's security and a Kerry who would run to the United Nations alter of Kofi Anon while screaming multiculturalism when yet another planeload of Islamic murderers punctuates the claim that radical terrorists hate America not because we are Republican unilateralists but rather hate us for the very qualities the Republicans revere and the Democrats sneer.
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