To: Biomaven who wrote (10301 ) 2/6/2004 12:53:03 PM From: scott_jiminez Read Replies (1) | Respond to OTIt is the contention of O'Neill -- and of Suskind, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of ''A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey From the Inner City to the Ivy League'' -- that in this White House, evidence and argument have been routinely pushed aside when they got in the way of previously decided political outcomes. That we've heard before. What enriches ''The Price of Loyalty,'' aside from the accretion of persuasive detail, is its assertion that in this administration, a time-honored notion of public service has been deeply corrupted. The book makes two basic and interlocking arguments. The first is that the United States has entered a period of what Phillips calls dynastic politics, in which the spouses and offspring of political figures are picking up where their relatives left off, to the detriment of democracy. The second is that the most important example of this phenomenon is not the Kennedys but the Bushes, who, beginning with George W. Bush's great-grandfathers, Samuel P. Bush and George H. Walker, assembled wealth and power by exploiting ties to Wall Street, arms merchants, the American intelligence apparatus and foreign dictators including Hitler. That wealth and power, and those connections, are why Bush is president today, Phillips says, and why his policies are what they are. Phillips finds the family fingerprints on everything from Bush's pursuit of Saddam Hussein to his leanings toward the energy industry, which, in the web Phillips weaves, are also related to each other.
