Jeff Koopersmith

APJ Holiday Gift Guide -- Part 1
Let Them Know What We've Lost
Why You Should Give Your Friends Graydon Carter's New Book This Holiday Season
By Jeff Koopersmith

Nov. 23, 2004 -- WASHINGTON (apj.us) -- Graydon Carter's new book, "What We've Lost" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2004) brings with it the subtitle:

"How the Bush Administration has curtailed our freedoms, mortgaged our economy, ravaged our environment, and damaged our standing in the world."

Ditto.

Graydon Carter is the erudite and eloquent editor of Vanity Fair. Regular readers of that magazine regularly will know that Mr. Carter has paid out a lot of cash to some great writers (exclusive of Christopher Hitchens) who entertain and educate readers on the nasty Bush Administration and its virtual rape of America in nearly all sectors.

In "What We've Lost," Graydon Carter lays it all out -- in twelve neat chapters of painless-to-read, easy to comprehend language -- from The President's Wars, The Military, The Economy, Health Care, to The Judiciary and more.

One of my favorite chapters is "The President by the Numbers," in which Carter lays out fascinating if not compelling statistics about George W. Bush that are eye-popping and wretchedly amusing at once -- again, broken out by category.

Some of the best examples:

On Bush and Terrorism
• ZERO -- Number of times Bush mentioned Osama Bin Laden in his three State of the Union addresses." Do you recall this? I wonder why?
• 73 -- Number of time Bush mentioned terrorism or terrorists in his three State of the Union addresses."
• $1 million -- Estimated value of a painting that Bush Presidential Library in College Station Texas, received from Prince Bandar, Saudi Arabia's Ambassador to the United States and Bush family friend." Remember -- the mega majority of men piloting 9/11 terror were Saudis.

On Bush the Military Man
• 1972 -- Year Bush walked away from his National Guard duties…" -- almost two years earlier than his contract with Uncle Sam.
• ZERO -- Number of guardsmen from that period who came forward with information of Bush's guard service."
• 46% - (My personal favorite) Increase in sales between 2001 and 2002 of G.I. Joe figures!

Bush and Iraq
• 1983 -- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld give Saddam Hussein a pair of golden spurs as a gift. (And arms him for Saddam's Iran war.)
• 237 -- Minimum number of misleading statements on Iraq by top Bush administration officials between 2002 and January 2004, according to Rep. Henry Waxman of California.
• 4,924 -- (And climbing every hour) The number of American troops killed or wounded in Iraq by May 2004.
• $2 Billion -- Estimated monthly cost of U.S. military presences in Iraq -- projected by the White House. (We now know this number is far greater)
• $32 Million -- Amount that (just) 10 leading private military firms spent on Washington lobbyists in 2001. (That's about $61,000 for every member of the House and Senate of the United States. Who gets all that money; and for what?

Bush -- The Soldier's Best Friend
• 40,000 -- Number of soldiers in Iraq seven months after start of the war -- still without Kevlar vests, which would have cost $60 million.
• $300 Million -- for one F-22 fighter.
• $1,000 -- average amount each of the 20,000 private contractors earns per day in Iraq.
• $100 -- average amount a marine earns per day working in Iraq.

Bush -- Making America Safer
• $3.29 -- Average amount allocated per U.S. citizen in first round homeland security grants.
• $36 -- Average amount allocated per person for homeland security in Wyoming -- Vice President Richard Cheney's home state!
• 2% - Percent of foreign goods arriving in the U.S. by sea that is inspected.

Bush -- Giving a hand to the "Advantaged"
• $10.9 million -- average worth of the members of the Bush original cabinet.
• 75% - Percent of Americans who got nothing from Bush's 2003 tax cuts in capital gains and dividends taxes.

I might go on with the list, but I would recommend instead that you scamper to your nearest bookstore and grab multiple copies of this book. Get one for yourself, and more for your friends -- especially if they're Republican, whether diehard Bush supporter or paleo-GOP skeptic -- because this book, better than any other, lays out at least a subliminal case that the brightest of the right have been hornswoggled by President Bush and his posse of contemptible goons.

No ideology, from socialist to neoconservative, has been spared the dagger by the Bush gang -- and Mr. Carter takes pains to point this out indirectly, without the slap, but convincingly and beyond others.

Of the nearly 50 Bush-critical books published to date, Graydon Carter's stands out as a must read.