Now We're Playing Pigball!

Two of the best-selling books in the country paint an ugly, scary picture of America under the Bush occupation government: Kitty Kelley's dubious but damning exposé, The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty (Doubleday, $29.95), and John E. O'Neill and Jerome Corsi's Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry (Regnery, $27.95), arguably the most contemptible No. 1 best seller since Mein Kampf.

I don't know which is more terrifying, the fact that the swinish Swifties may help get Dubya re-elected without benefit of a second coup d'etat by the Bush-whore Supreme Court; or the fact that by comparison with O'Neill and the Swifties, Kelley, character assassin to the stars, comes off like the dean of American historians. She used to be the state of the art when it came to slanderous charges by often unnamed sources. Now she's been upstaged by a bunch of ex-Navy nobodies who are only too happy to give their names in service of the Big Lie.

WHICH BOOK TELLS—or reveals—bigger whoppers? As she tried to pry reality from the black hole of facts that is the Bush regime, Kelley says she "felt like Alice in Wonderland because what I uncovered seemed unreal." It only seemed so because the American Taliban has been so cunning in tricking the nation into believing impossible things before every breakfast. People really believe that tax cuts for the top 1 percent somehow benefit them, and that Saddam was behind 9/11 and had the power to repeat the feat, just as Saudis, under the yoke of the Bush sheiks' Wahhabist counterparts, believe that 9/11 was concocted by Israel and the Jew-controlled U.S. government.

Yet some of Kelley's sources behave like the Cheshire Cat. Savings-and-loan-scandal man Neil Bush's coldly ditched ex-wife, Sharon, tells Kelley that "W. had snorted cocaine with one of his brothers at Camp David during the time that their father was President . . . Not once, but many times." But Sharon now disavows the drug-use charge (also supported by a few more mostly unnamed sources), perhaps fearing the notoriously vindictive Bushes. Thus, without checkable sources, Kelley is sometimes reduced to using the same nonargument as the Liar-in-Chief: trust me.

Still, she does nail George W., George H.W., and diverse Bushes on demonstrable lies, indicating a family tradition of deception. Using some checkable sources, assembling familiar information filled in with original research, she sketches a persuasive picture of Dubya's stony '70s, and much other firm dirt. Even if you toss out all her anonymous sources, a basic Bush fact pattern emerges. At worst, it's off by a few grams more or less.

But, as Kelley makes clear, Bush gets away with murder every time. In 2000, faced with a finally revealed DUI from 1976, he was not yet experienced enough and 9/11–armored enough to try the bald-faced lie. Today, when a credible witness charges him with daddy-string-pulling in his military service, he lucks out via Dan Rather's faked-docugate, and the supine media decline to point out that, though the physical document in question is false, it supports the underlying truth. Kelley writes that satanic puppet-master Karl Rove estimated that Bush's weak response to the drunk-driving charge cost him 1 million votes. Thanks to Bush's Osama-conferred faux gravitas and Rove's ever-cleverer scheming, Bush now responds to all challenges with a confident, devastatingly effective concoction of flat-out falsehoods and quarter-truths.

Whether or not Rove is pulling their strings (O'Neill risibly claims to be non- Republican, though he funds them and his tactics precisely echo Rove's), his Kerry-quashing Unfit book illustrates how far the right has come in warding off reality. Back in the day, as Kelley demonstrates, George H.W. Bush was able to fend off criticism of his alleged World War II heroism, relying on the decency and forbearance of reporters and fellow combatants who lacked smoking-gun evidence proving that he bailed out on his plane against orders in the absence of flames, let his pals die, and lied about seeing one of his pal's parachutes go down.

The Swift boat veterans have no such compunctions about sliming Kerry's Vietnam War heroism. Today a porcine Texas attorney trained by the malevolent Nixon appointee Justice Rehnquist, O'Neill was then the skinny little reactionary weasel whom Chuck Colson, Nixon's dirty trickster, deployed to counter Kerry's Vietnam Veterans Against the War back in 1971. He denies that the Nixon tricksters put him up to founding the Bizarro World Viet-vet group mirroring and opposing Kerry's VVAW. I believe the account of the repentant born-again Christian Colson, not the hydrophobic attack dog O'Neill.

In confusing, remarkably poorly marshaled detail, and with a halting command of English reminiscent of the lunkhead Bizarro Superman in DC Comics, Unfit charges that Kerry self-inflicted his Purple Heart wounds, lied about being in Cambodia (which O'Neill himself lied about, on tape, to Nixon), conspired with VVAW on terrorist violence (though Kerry was trying to oust the VVAW radicals), and committed atrocities against Vietnamese people and helpless domestic animals.