Utter Incompetents: Ego and Ideology in the Age of Bush

"Tom Oliphant is one of the true chroniclers of America. He uses his wit and wisdom to offer critical, insightful, and loving observations of our politics, culture, and society. He is the Will Rogers of our time." ---Madeleine Albright The collapse of the Bush presidency is a broadly acknowledged fact. By any fair assessment, much of the past seven years has been disastrous. The challenge is to understand why. From domestic policy to international goofs, from soaring energy prices to the health care crisis---Thomas Oliphant tackles it all, closely inspecting the initial projections and promises of Bush and his key senior of?cials, and the ways in which they lost control of these well-publicized and overcon?dent plans. By comparing their rhetoric to their dismal record, Oliphant provides a historic analysis of the Bush administration---showing how a system so seemingly competent and mechanized could fail so miserably, and with such frequency. Utter Incompetents is at its heart a searching look at the George W. Bush administration, its policies, and the legacy that it will leave behind on January 20, 2009.

About the Author :
Thomas Oliphant has been a correspondent for The Boston Globe since 1968 and its Washington columnist since 1989. He is a native of Brooklyn, a product of La Jolla High School in California, and a 1967 graduate of Harvard. He was one of three editors on special assignment who managed the Globe's coverage of Boston's traumatic school desegregation, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. He has also won the writing award given by the American Society of Newspaper Editors. He has appeared on ABC's Nightline, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Face the Nation, The Today Show, Good Morning America, and CBS News' This Morning. He has been named one of the country's top ten political writers and one of Washington's fifty most influential journalists by The Washingtonian magazine. Mr. Oliphant lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, CBS correspondent Susan Spencer.

Review :
"Tom Oliphant is one of the true chroniclers of America. He uses his wit and wisdom to offer critical, insightful, and loving observations of our politics, culture, and society. He is the Will Rogers of our time." --Madeleine Albright "Done right, political discourse is a feast. And Tom Oliphant brings more to the table than anyone I know." --Al Franken "We're lucky that in this book, [Oliphant's] chosen to focus on the Bush administration---even if Bush isn't. Cheney won't like this story, the real story. Readers will love it." --Robert M. Shrum "The book not only teems with detail but also will tell the future historians, long after living memory has faded, just what Bush's contemporary critics thought of the man and his record." --St. Louis Post-Dispatch "[T]his competent narrative will appeal to readers yearning for one more fix of righteous liberal indignation." --Publishers Weekly