Frank Rich (2) (1949–)

I'll give it the extra half-star here.
It's a beautiful, magical memoir of theatergoing. Sure, there's family life and suburban angst and even some real socio-political stuff - and of course the inherent drama of being a teenager at any time - but this book is really about the theater. And the magic of going to, being a part of, and otherwise experiencing it. If you like theater, you need to read this book. You'll leave it feeling warm and fuzzy and happy inside. If you don't like theater, steer clear. Anywhere in between... my guess is, you'll come out wanting to go buy a ticket to a show.

if only they were still $4.50 or even 9.50, as they were back in the day. Le sigh.

More at RB: http://wp.me/pGVzJ-rj… (mer)

I put off reading this book for a year, for no good reason. Frank Rich has written an excellent account of the use of communications tools--the media and media techniques, basic public relations principles, and so forth--in government. Although focused on the Bush administration, Rich looks at the Clinton Administration, the US news media and news outlets and the broader social context of the first years of the twenty-first century in America. Well-researched, this book offers perceptive analysis in a very readable narrative.… (mer)

I found this a useful book - as far as it goes - which is not very far.

Rich gives an interesting blow by blow account of the media sales spin applied to the WMD and Iraq/Al Qaeda lies used by the American government to justify its invasion of Iraq.

What he leaves to a much smaller section in the epilogue is the obvious question, " ... what really did trigger the war in Iraq?"

His answer, is that in 1992, what were to become the neocons "...conceived a controversial manifesto preaching the importance of asserting unilateral American military power after the cold war. Well before the next Bush took office, these and other neocons fated to join his camp had become fixated on Iraq, though for reasons having much to do with their own ideas about exerting American force to jump-start a realignment of the Middle East and little or nothing to do with the stateless terrorism of Al Qaeda or with nation building." and he essentially leaves it at that.

I found a detailed explanation of the missing part of the story in Sniegoski's, "The Transparent Cabal". He shows how hard line Likudnik Jews in the Bush administration and the American Enterprise Institute, JINSA (Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs) and CSP (Centre for Security Policy) successfully hijacked American foreign policy at a critical point in history.

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Secretary of State Powell's chief of staff and was well aware of Feith's Israel orientation, stated in regard to him and his neocon associate David Wurmser:
"A lot of these guys, including Wurmser, I looked at as card-carrying members of the Likud party, as I did with Feith. You wouldn't open their wallet and find a card, but often I wondered if their primary allegiance was to their own country or to Israel. That was the thing that troubled me, because there was so much they said and did that looked like it was more reflective of Isreal's interest than our own."

In this unbalanced book, Rich doesn't look at the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan (Israel related) wars but to date (January 2010) they have cost the American taxpayer $ 950.322.000.000 and about 4.500 dead. The Iraqi figure is about 151.000 completely unneccessary fatalities and a wrecked country.

He is only choosing to tell half the story while presenting it as the full story - which is a rather deceptive sales job in itself. If the reader doesn't bother with the epilogue and find a single vague paragraph there, it appears that George Bush invented the Iraq war all by himself.… (mer)