Bush's Cut & Paste Book

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/12/george-bush-book-decision-points_n_782731.html?utm_campaign=111210&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Alert-politics&utm_content=Title&utm_term=Daily+Brief#s180908

George Bush Book 'Decision Points' Lifted From Advisers' Books
First Posted: 11-12-10 01:48 PM | Updated: 11-12-10 04:17 PM

When Crown Publishing inked a deal with George W. Bush for his memoirs, the publisher knew it wasn't getting Faulkner. But the book, at least, promises "gripping, never-before-heard detail" about the former president's key decisions, offering to bring readers "aboard Air Force One on 9/11, in the hours after America's most devastating attack since Pearl Harbor; at the head of the table in the Situation Room in the moments before launching the war in Iraq," and other undisclosed and weighty locations.

Crown also got a mash-up of worn-out anecdotes from previously published memoirs written by his subordinates, from which Bush lifts quotes word for word, passing them off as his own recollections. He took equal license in lifting from nonfiction books about his presidency or newspaper or magazine articles from the time. Far from shedding light on how the president approached the crucial "decision points" of his presidency, the clip jobs illuminate something shallower and less surprising about Bush's character: He's too lazy to write his own memoir...

...Many of Bush's literary misdemeanors exemplify pedestrian sloth, but others are higher crimes against the craft of memoir. In one prime instance, Bush relates a poignant meeting between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and a Tajik warlord on Karzai's Inauguration Day. It's the kind of scene that offers a glimpse of a hopeful future for the beleaguered nation. Witnessing such an exchange could color a president's outlook, could explain perhaps Bush's more optimistic outlook and give insight into his future decisions. Except Bush didn't witness it. Because he wasn't at Karzai's inauguration. His absence doesn't stop Bush from relating this anecdote: "When Karzai arrived in Kabul for his inauguration on December 22 - 102 days after 9/11 - several Northern Alliance leaders and their bodyguards greeted him at an airport. As Karzai walked across the tarmac alone, a stunned Tajik warlord asked where all his men were. Karzai, responded, 'Why, General, you are my men. All of you who are Afghans are my men.'"

That meeting would sound familiar to Ahmed Rashid, author of "The Mess in Afghanistan", who wrote in the New York Review of Books: "At the airport to receive was the warlord General Mohammad Fahim, a Tajik from the Panjshir Valley .... As the two men shook hands on the tarmac, Fahim looked confused. 'Where are your men?' he asked. Karzai turned to him in his disarmingly gentle manner of speaking. 'Why General," he replied, "you are my men--all of you are Afghans and are my men.'"

It's what it seems: a paste job written by an anonymous rent-a-hack with a few personal anecdotes added for color.

Unless, you want to believe that Dubya reads The New York Review of Books. . . LMAO.:spray:

"Bow down and swear fealty to the king. Now get back to work, slave."

I shudder to think how much worse off we'd all be. Thank whatever for small favors.