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Book: Bushwhacked: Life In G. W. Bush's America
Written by Molly Ivins and Len Dubose (Random House)
Reviewed by Rusty Pipes
Since this is mostly a music publication you may not know who Molly Ivins is. She's a columnist who has been writing on politics for years, mostly in the Texas Observer and The Progressive, and she's also a breath of fresh air around the cesspool that passes for punditry in this country. As a Texan Ivins has had much longer to observe Dubya in action than most of us. This is her second book on "Shrub" as they like to call him in The Great State and again she is collaborating with Len Dubose.
You may feel like you know a lot about the transgressions of Bush The Second, but you haven't really assessed the terrible impact of his domestic policies until you've read Bushwhacked. It's quite different than the recent books by Al Franken and Michael Moore. Though Molly's wry sense of humor pops up regularly, this book is a sobering account of how much damage the Bush Administration has managed to create in the last two and a half years.
The evisceration of the Environmental Protection Agency alone should be enough to make you mad, and they document it with several reports (from the green rabbits of New Jersey to the dead cottonwoods of Wyoming), but Ivins and Dubose also tell stories of the Bushies cutting off heating subsidies to the poor in winter, of favors handed out to Enron's Kenny Boy, and the millions of kids left behind in spite of the No Child Left Behind Act.
What is really scary though is the way that the Bush FDA has been reducing the level of meat inspections. The new regulations that meat inspectors are given to follow are completely tilted to industry convenience. Ivins and Dubose point out that only the grossest visual violations are cause to halt the ever faster production lines, making life easier only for bacteria that contaminate the food we eat and the fat cats who profit when we buy it. A word to the wise: even if you don't read the book, COOK YOUR FOOD THOROUGHLY. It reads like a new chapter in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.
The strangest thing is that Bush often seems to rub our nose in it. Bushwacked tells of several times he's made lofty promises about an important program, only to cut funding or lay off enforcement personnel when we are not looking -- sometimes only days later! His brand of Compassionate Conservatism would be laughable, except that there is real human tragedy here. Reading Bushwacked will open your eyes to the venal government-to-the-highest-donor kind of government Bush has brought us.
© 2004 - Rusty Pipes