Thou Shalt Not Speak Ill of Bush

On Feb. 21, Doubleday will publish the book that cost me my job: Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy.

The germination began when I heard about the extraordinary efforts made by the White House to ram the Medicare drug benefit through the House of Representatives during the night. Until that point, I had given President Bush the benefit of the doubt—even on things with which I was uncomfortable. For example, I had reluctantly concluded the Iraq War was justified on the basis of what I knew at the time it began.

I don’t normally write about foreign policy, but I felt that I had an obligation as a “public intellectual” to render a judgment before the war. It would have been too easy to wait and see what happened and then choose the popular side afterwards.

I still don’t know what information the White House had about WMD, and I don’t believe that President Bush knowingly falsified data to undertake a war he had already decided upon for other reasons. But I am dismayed that the White House subsequently claimed that WMD were only a secondary reason for the war and that liberating the Iraqi people was the primary aim.

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Although I lost my job for writing a book critical of George W. Bush, I have no regrets. Sometimes you just have to say the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes. My loyalty to my country and my party supersede whatever loyalty I may have to my president. As someone once said, facts are hard things.

tags: bush  congress  miers  bartlett  corruption