"Decision Points": Another Wake Up Call

Around 2 million copies of George W. Bush’s memoir, "Decision Points", have been sold since its release in mid-November. No doubt a big portion of those were delivered yesterday as Christmas gifts. We think the book will be yet another gift of a wake-up call to America—and may cause an under-the-radar stir that won’t be picked up right away but will be very significant to enlarging and further energizing the tea party movement. The reason: the book puts the lie to the Pravda media portrayals of Bush so ‘self-evidently’ that even the honest opponent of Bush will feel a sense of disgust and betrayal at what a partisan, anti-Christian, anti-American disgrace the mainstream American media has become.

We know Bush supporters will like the book, and we know there are Bush-haters who will hate the book and write bile-filled reviews of it (without reading it), but some of those two million readers will be in neither camp. They will be very familiar with the mainstream media templates: Bush the cowboy, Bush the lightweight, Bush the war-monger, Bush the racist, Bush the liar, and they will read the book out of curiosity (or out of a sense of obligation to whoever gave the book to them). Reading it may or may not turn a Bush opponent into a supporter, but it will show to anyone with a brain and a pulse that the media templates were not just false but outrageously, over-the-top, maliciously false. The decent among us—no matter how we cast our votes in elections—cannot help being deeply offended by the gap that was created by the media between perception and fact relating to George W. Bush.

We know politics ain’t beanbag, and the Presidency is the very definition of the major leagues in terms of stirring commentary for and against, including a sizable portion of vitriol. But Americans as a whole historically have expected the mainstream media to be somewhere near objective. News of the bias of the media has been bubbling for years, and the most engaged Americans have known the bias problem is real, entrenched and systemic. (Rupert Murdoch was smart enough to see how the problem created a huge opportunity for Fox News, but that’s a separate story). But many less engaged Americans still want to believe that the media is still doing the best it can, trying to get it right, making a few mistakes along the way because nobody’s perfect, and so they continue to tune in or at least mildly pay attention. Once they read Decision Points, they may finally stop tuning in or paying attention.

What will have been absorbed from Bush’s book is more than can or will be shrugged off or simply forgotten. America had a good and decent and intelligent man as President for eight tumultuous, consequential years, and America had a media industry devoted to a savage and unrelenting effort to disparage, denigrate and destroy the man. This wasn’t loyal opposition; it wasn’t speaking truth to power; it wasn’t a precious exercise of First Amendment rights by a courageous “Fourth Estate”. It was a display of values and judgment and character completely at odds with those of most Americans.

And now that same media is engaged in a systematic, unrelenting shill for a President who is in every fundamental way completely at odds with the values, judgment and character of the American people.

A media defiant of truth and willing to try to create its own truth is a media destined for collapse, but it has a chance to take America and Americans down with it—unless ‘everyone’ is awake and can’t be fooled. Bush’s book has reminded Americans again of what the media is and is doing, and will awaken yet another portion of the American people. One more service W has performed for the country he dearly loves.

Paul Gable

December 26, 2010