Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk – Maureen Dowd

Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk – Maureen Dowd, Putnam/Penguin Group (2004) 523pp. (LF) ***

Bushworld is, like The Great Unraveling, Backstory, and Chain of Command, yet another collection of previously printed material, bound together in a single volume. Whether you find Dowd to be more tongue-in-cheek than simply sharp tongued, there is surely enough sarcasm to go around in these pages. Her targets, (principally the Bush administration, though there are a few barbs at Kerry’s expense) are more than well deserving of her abuse. What the reader will soon come to discover, however, is that Dowd is usually more concerned with style than substance, even though many of her criticisms of the Bush administration are dead on target. Unlike her colleague, Paul Krugman, who as an economist is able to back his words with the authority and insights of his occupation, Dowd is at heart a rhetorician, more interested in striking the right pitch in her prose than necessarily making the most cogent argument.

One area in particular where this reviewer must take great exception to Dowd is when she describes the present administration thusly: “this group [Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle] is far more conservative . . . than [Bush Sr., Scowcroft, Powell, Baker].”(p.290) What, exactly, is conservative about launching aggressive war using defensive forces (a.k.a. the Guard and Reserve) while financing such radical adventurism with three tax cuts, ballooning deficits and a growing federal debt, while making us all the more vulnerable to Chinese creditors? These policies are anything but conservative. Conservative would be things like a balanced budget and isolationism, while maintaining a strong defense, not over-extending it and running it into the ground. Only when we begin to call a spade a spade and start to look beyond the moderate window-dressing, will these radical neo-fascists be exposed for the extremists they genuinely are.

Dowd keeps repeatedly striking important themes, like the absence of Iraqi WMD, the absence of Osama, etc. On July 20, 2003 she wrote, “the list of evils the administration has not unearthed keeps getting longer – Osama, Saddam, the anthrax terrorist – as the deficit gets bigger.”(p.379) Three out of four are still relevant, and of course, her observation regarding the deficit is still quite pertinent. One thing that can be said for Dowd is her consistency. By hammering away repeatedly at the same themes, she is doing her best to write a history counter to what the perpetual Bush Wurlitzer would have us believe. If journalists indeed are the ones who write the first pages of history, then we must necessarily be thankful for her services.