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Unlawful Government: Preserving America in a Post-constitutional Age by Wilton H. Strickland (West Conshohocken, PA: Infinity Publishing, 2006), Amazon.com $11.95.

Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy by Bruce Bartlett. Hardcover: 320 pages. (New York, NY: Doubleday, 2006) Amazon Price: $16.38.

An Imposter, a Pretend Conservative!!

Bush came into office riding on a tide of popular backlash directed at the scandal-plagued Clinton administration. Bush even went so far as to present himself as the consummate Reaganite. Nonetheless, G.W. Bush’s last few years of leadership from foreign policy to domestic issues have been uninspiring and characterized by a profound increase of government spending, record budget deficits, an exploding national debt, a reckless interventionist foreign policy, and a post-9/11 barb-wiretapped police state that completely eviscerates the Bill of Rights.

The ill-conceived 2005 Bush nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court marked the dramatic opening of a fissure within Republican ranks over the sitting President. Miers had no judicial bench experience but was rather a lottery commissioner with questionable business dealings, and she was a financial contributor to the Democratic Party. In fact, many professed Republican stalwarts began to question Bush’s leadership once and for all after this lamentable move.

The Bush track record speaks for itself. On foreign policy, the avoidable Iraq War was justified on false pretenses of an elusive national security threat that was never substantiated. It was all to overthrow a dictator that the United States hypocritically propped up and supported for two decades. By 2004, at the behest of his spin-doctors, Bush was campaigning for reelection and boasting that his administration was trying to spread global democracy to the four corners of the earth. The elusive Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) went down the Orwellian memory well. He simply found a new neo-Jacobin rationale for his foreign meddling and the Iraq War which is all the more spurious. His economic, fiscal and budgetary track record is no less problematic. As Bartlett documents, Bush never vetoes spending bills coming out of Congress, and he has presided over the largest budget deficits in history. His economic and fiscal policies are misguided and reckless. The U.S. government is one step away from insolvency, and may soon turn to monetary inflation in order to pay its bills.