| About the Book
 The Greatest Story Ever Sold
The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina
By Frank Rich
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When America was attacked on 9/11, its citizens
almost unanimously rallied behind its new, untested president as he went to war.
What they didn’t know at the time was that the Bush administration’s highest
priority would not be to vanquish Al Qaeda but to consolidate its own power at
any cost. It was a mission that could only be accomplished by a propaganda
presidency in which reality was steadily replaced by a scenario of the White
House’s own invention—and such was that scenario’s devious brilliance that it
fashioned a second war against an enemy who did not attack America on 9/11,
intimidated the Democrats into incoherence and impotence, and turned a
presidential election into an irrelevant referendum on macho imagery, Vietnam
and “moral values.”
As only he can, acclaimed New York Times
columnist Frank Rich delivers a step-by-step chronicle of how skillfully the
White House built its house of cards, and how the institutions that should have
exposed these fictions, the mainstream news media, were too often left powerless
by the administration’s relentless attack machine, their own post-9/11 timidity,
and an unending parade of self-inflicted scandals (typified by those at The
New York Times). Demonstrating the candor and conviction that have made him
one of our most trusted and incisive public voices, he brilliantly and
meticulously illuminates the White House’s disturbing love affair with “truthiness,”
and the ways in which a bungled war, a seemingly obscure Washington leak, and a
devastating hurricane at long last revealed the man-behind-the-curtain, and the
story that had so effectively been sold to the nation as God-given patriotic
fact.
Reviews:
". . . a caustic, hard-hitting indictment of the Bush administration, timed to make a splash in the upcoming election campaign."
--Publishers Weekly
". . . a scathing rebuke of the current administration's definition of truth . . ."
--Kirkus Reviews
Published by Penguin Press
September 2006
352 pages / hardcover
ISBN: 159420098X |
