Frank Rich's new book

["Claudia Ayers" <cayers@aptoshs.net>]

Dear all,

My high school classmate, Frank Rich (Woodrow Wilson High in Washington, 
D.C. class of 1967), has logged 5 weeks on the NYT Best Seller's list with 
The Greatest Story Ever Sold: the Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to 
Katrina. I finally finished the book, it was hard to read more than a few 
pages of day. Four paragraphs into the Epilogue, you will find these two 
paragraphs:

Rice was right about one thing: history will be the judge of the Iraq War. 
But neither she nor anyone else can predict that verdict. Perhaps future 
generations will discover that George W. Bush was a visionary who worked a 
miracle--that by knocking out one thug in the Middle East he set off a 
domino effect that led to democratic reform in a region gripped by 
totalitarianism, tribal hatreds, and radical fundamentalism. If so, he will 
be amoung the luckiest players in the history book, and history tells us 
that sometimes it does pay to be more lucky than smart.

The other alternative, of course, is that this war of choice could prove to 
be an enormous victory for Iran and Al Qaeda alike, a commensurate disaster 
for Israel and the West, and a political boon to other jihadists worldwide 
(starting with those who sonsolidated governmental power in the 
U.S.-endorsed elections in Iraq, Palestine, and Egypt). Should that be the 
case, the Bush presidency could well prove, as its most severe critics have 
maintained, the worst ever. Its legacy will include the destruction of 
America's image, credibility, and presitige abroad; record budget deficits 
produced by unchecked spending and achieved by rigidly ideological judicial 
appointments, the abridgement of civil liberties, and outright lawbreading 
in the White Hours; an indifference to environmental imperatives, including 
the energy conservation urgently needed to end America's chronic economic 
dependence on the congenitally unstable Middle East; and the promottion of 
American's homegrown religious fundamentalism with both official and 
political assaults on medical and earth science (including evolution) and 
the rights of gay Americans. (And that's just the short list.) Even the 
supposedly beatific Bush achievements will be heavily asterisked. No Child 
Left Behind education reform did more for the nation's testing industry than 
for students, who found their curricula narrowed to the two subjects (math 
and reading) measured by the tests. The administration's AIDS initiative was 
blunted by being yoked to abstinence programs that flattered Christian right 
voters in the Republican base but were irrelevant to the rampaging 
life-or-death tragedy in Africa.

A good bunch of us in high school organized a Students for Administrative 
Reform protest against our Principal who had vetoed a Home Rule editorial 
Frank had written for our school newspaper, amoung other things. We were 
good friends then, and I have seen him maybe half a dozen times since. I 
last saw Frank when he was doing a Spring speaking tour at Zellerbach Hall 
in Berkeley last April, and I had a chance after the talk to express my 
concerns (which he nicely summarized!) with the thought that "somehow this 
all connects even with the war, since cronyism seems be to the main name of 
Bush's game." I know it wasn't just my influence, Frank reads his own paper, 
but I was most pleased to read these words. The book is fantastic!! A must 
read by all on this list....except Art, who won't like it one bit....but who 
needs to read it the most.

Back to my prep period!

claudia ayers
in rainy day soquel, ca