corrente

Atrios recommends that we check out Krugman's review of American Dynasty and The Price of Loyalty so I did. Here's the stuff to feed the troops:

Still, the fundamental question isn't what motivates the Bush family and its retainers. It's how such a self-interested clan, with little by way of a redeeming record of public service, could have come to such a position of power.

There are three strands to Phillips's thesis. First is the effect of surging economic inequality, which has led to a broad-based "dynastization of America." To put the matter simply, the economic elite has become far more elite than it was a generation ago. Since the late 1970s, the top 1 percent of the population has more than doubled its share of national income, and the top 0.01 percent has increased its share by a factor of six. Today there is, to an extent not seen since the 1920s, a substantial class of people wealthy enough to form their own dynasties.

Second is the, um, unholy alliance between the dynastic class and the religious right. I found Phillips's explanation of how Bush uses religiously charged language to signal his alliance with fundamentalists revelatory. Biblical scholar Bruce Lincoln's line-by-line analysis of Bush's October 7, 2001, address to the nation announcing the US attack on Afghanistan identified a half dozen veiled borrowings from the Book of Revelation, Isaiah, Job, Matthew, and Jeremiah. He concluded that for those with ears to hear a biblical subtext, "by the [speech's] end America's adversaries have been redefined as enemies of God and current events have been constituted as confirmation of scripture."

The third strand in Phillips's explanation of the Bush dynasty's success isits virtuosity in misrepresenting what it's up to ... Under Bush, it seems, political rhetoric bears no relation to reality—what officials say has nothing in common with what they do, or what they think. And policy decisions are driven almost entirely by politics, by what the political arm thinks will play well with "the base."

So, what are we going to do about "what's happened to our country"?