‘Damn right,’ I said

Eliot Weinberger of the London Review of Books casts a critical eye on former President Bush's memoir "Decision Points." As someone said on Twitter today, his book review "may be the all-time great takedown" of Dubya.

Teeing off from a prescient observation by Michel Foucault -- who said: "Today’s writing has freed itself from the theme of expression" -- Weinberger writes:

"Even the title of the book unchains the signifier from the signified. ‘Decision points’ is business-speak for a list of factors, usually marked by a bullet in PowerPoint presentations, that should be considered before making a decision. There are no decision points in Decision Points. Despite what is claimed above, Bush never stops to consider. He is the Decider who acts impulsively and ‘crisply’, drawing on his ‘moral clarity’. In the scariest line in the book, he has been allowed to let slip that his motive for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq was simple revenge, surely the least desirable emotional quality one would want in a world leader with access to nuclear weapons. About 9/11 the text says: ‘My blood was boiling. We were going to find out who did this, and kick their ass.’"

"... In the book, as in his life, Bush the postmodernist is a simulacrum: a Connecticut blueblood who pretended to be a Texas cowboy, though he couldn’t ride a horse and lived on a ‘ranch’ with no cattle. He was, and is, happiest when surrounded by professionals in the three areas in which he was a notable failure: athletics, the military and business. He is like a sports fan who dresses up in the team jersey to watch the game. References to his ‘military service’ recur frequently throughout the book, as though it were actually more than a few months spent avoiding it. He was the only modern American president to appear in public in a military uniform – even Eisenhower never wore his while president – like a ribboned despot from a banana republic."

Read the entire review here. It's quite entertaining.