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The Greatest Story Ever Sold
Frank Rich
The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina
Penguin
September 2006
On Sale: September 19, 2006
352 pages ISBN: 159420098X EAN: 9781594200984 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Political
New York Times columnist Frank Rich examines the
trail of fictions manufactured by the Bush administration
from 9/11 to Hurricane Katrina, exposing the most brilliant
spin campaign ever waged. 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 was not to vanquish Al Qaeda but to consolidate its
own power at any cost. It was a mission that could be
accomplished only 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
that 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 and same-sex marriage. 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, Rich
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.
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