My newly published book, “How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime,” (Princeton University Press), http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/069112888X/ref=pd_rhf_p_1/002-8165589-3886440?ie=UTF8 is a first draft of the history of the Bush presidency in and an analysis of its unprecedented radicalism.

The fifth anniversary of 9/11 illustrated in many ways how Bush has exploited the trauma to pursue his radical agendas. The public was supposed to remember the event as the occasion of the president’s heroism. Not only are we to forget “My Pet Goat” but also Bush’s dismissal of the Aug. 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Brief, “Bin Laden Determined To Strike In United States.” We are encouraged to recall the iconic pose of Bush on the rubble of the World Trade Center, bullhorn in hand, arm wrapped around a fireman, but not the giddy president in airman’s uniform striding on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln to stand before a sign proclaiming, “Mission Accomplished.”

Vice President Dick Cheney was trotted out this Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press to express no apologies for the disinformation he put out to rationalize the Iraq war and to declare, as though he were Frank Skeffington in “The Last Hurrah,” that he’d do it all again. (Cheney, arrogant, menacing and surly, is an opposite character type from Skeffington, the classic lovable rogue, based on Boston mayor James Michael Curley.)

Bush has delivered a series of speeches, featuring hysterical rhetoric, tying all Islamic groups, Sunni and Shiite alike, into “a single movement,” and announcing that he is ending his torture policy, but not really. To begin with he said that there had been no torture or policy to justify it, that the rules for the thing that didn’t exist would change, and he proposed “alternative” methods of interrogation that amounted to torture, which of course he doesn’t condone.

Karl Rove, for his part, labored furiously to turn Bush’s new torture proposal into a means to demonize Democrats as weaklings against terrorists. Rove’s intent is to create TV ads for the mid-term elections campaign in order to maintain the Republican Congress and through that one-party rule that has suppressed regular oversight. The Republican National Committee has joined in with agitprop email about Democrats called “America Weakly.” By Monday, a right-wing group unreeled a TV commercial it obviously had planned beforehand, showing the burning Twin Towers: "They say we should close Guantanamo, where captured foes are kept from waging war against us. ... They seem to think we'll be safer if we cut and run." Then the voiceover tells voters to vote Republican—or die: "Vote as if your life depended on it. Because it does."

Throughout the 9/11 commemorations and Bush speeches, ABC broadcast a two-part program, “The Path to 9/11,” deliberately falsifying history, in particular inventing tales to blame the Clinton administration for al Qaeda’s terrorism. Unsurprisingly, it turned out that a right-wing operation had produced and written the film. ABC’s acquiescence in promoting false history is a telling example of the media’s abasing behavior toward the Bush administration. The appearance of the Orwellian fiction was perfectly timed to the kick-off of the Republican campaign. Meanwhile, the Washington Post reported that a Marine colonel intelligence officer in Iraq has filed an analysis stating that western Anbar province is lost politically.

I raise many issues in the book that I hope stirs discussion on Talking Points Memo: Bush’s uniquely radical presidency; his war on national security career staff professionals; the power of the vice president and the proliferation of networks of ideological cadres under his wing; one-party rule, the “K Street Project” and congressional corruption; and Rove’s polarizing political strategies. Bush’s effort to concentrate unaccountable and unfettered power in the executive is the ultimate objective of his various policies and politics.

I have included below excerpts from the introduction of “How Bush Rules,” which is entitled, “A Radical President.” (Salon.com has just published the entire 10,000-word introduction here.: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/09/12/book_excerpt/)

No one predicted just how radical a president George W. Bush would be. Neither his opponents, nor the reporters covering him, nor his closest campaign aides suggested that he would be the most willfully radical president in American history….

Immediately upon assuming office, Bush launched upon a series of initiatives that began to undo the bipartisan traditions of internationalism, environmentalism, fiscal discipline, and scientific progress. His first nine months in office were a quick march to the right. The reasons were manifold ranging from Cheney and Rumsfeld’s extraordinary influence, Rove’s strategies, the neoconservatives’ inordinate sway, and Bush’s Southern conservatism. These deeper patterns were initially obscured by the surprising rapidity of Bush’s determined tack.

By September 10, Bush held the lowest job approval rating of any president to that early point in his tenure. He appeared to be falling into the pattern of presidents who arrived without a popular mandate and lasted only one term. The deadliest foreign attack on American soil transformed his foundering presidency.

The events of September 11 lent Bush the aura of legitimacy that Bush v. Gore had not granted. Catastrophe infused him with the charisma of a “war president,” as he proclaimed himself. At once, his radicalism had an unobstructed path….

Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld were the prime movers behind the concentration of power in the executive. Their experience going back to the Nixon presidency had imbued them with belief in absolute presidential power, disdain for the Congress (“a bunch of annoying gnats,” Cheney called its members, of which he had once been one), and secrecy….

Foreign policy was captured by neoconservative ideologues, a small group of sectarians rooted in the hothouse environment of the capital’s right-wing think tanks. Its principals had been fired from the Reagan administration after the Iran-contra scandal and banished from the elder Bush’s administration, but Bush rewarded them with positions at the strategic heights of national security. These cadres operated with a Leninist sensibility following a party line, engaging in fierce polemics, using harsh invective, and showing equal contempt for traditional Republicans and liberal Democrats. Cheney acted as their sponsor, protector and promoter. Under his aegis, they ran foreign policy from the White House and the Pentagon. Secretary of State Colin Powell was sidelined. The

Undersecretary of State John Bolton, inserted by Cheney, blocked Powell’s initiatives and spied on him and his team, reporting back to the Office of the Vice President. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice made a separate peace and turned the National Security Council into an augmented force for Cheney and the neocons. Meanwhile, Republican realists, including elder Bush’s closest associates such as Brent Scowcroft, were isolated or purged….

Less than a year after September 11, the administration was beset by disclosures that it had refused to take terrorism seriously before the attacks and by stories about dysfunction at the FBI. An FBI agent at the Minneapolis bureau, Coleen Rowley, emerged with documentation of how the Bureau had ignored warnings of the coming terrorist strike. On the day that she testified before the Senate, June 6, 2002, Bush suddenly announced a dramatic reversal of his position against the Democratic proposal for a Department of Homeland Security. Rowley’s story was blotted out.

Bush now turned the issue of a new department against the Democrats in the midterm elections, following Rove’s script. In Bush’s proposal the department would not recognize unions, and because the Democrats believed that employees should have the right to form unions they were cast as weak on homeland security and terrorism. Against this backdrop, Rove helped direct attacks on the patriotism of Democrats in the 2002 midterm elections. In one Republican television commercial, the face of Senator Max Cleland of Georgia, a Vietnam veteran who had lost three limbs, was morphed into that of Osama bin Laden, and Cleland lost. The Republicans captured the Senate by one seat….

Traditional Republicans emerged among Bush’s most penetrating critics, from O’Neill to Wilkerson, from Zinni to Clarke. They were not hostile to Bush when he entered office; on the contrary, they were willing and eager to serve under him. They observed first-hand, more than opponents on the outside, the radical changes Bush was making within the government. As Republicans, more than Democrats, they understood which traditions of their own were being traduced….

The Bush White House, drawing harsh cautionary lessons from the Nixon experience, considered the press an extremely dangerous enemy that must be treated with contempt—isolated, intimidated, and, if not made pliable, discredited. The administration favored Fox News and other conservative media, using them as quasi-official government propaganda organs. Joining the long project by the conservative movement, the administration sought to bring the press into disrepute and marginalize it. If journalists did not support the administration’s talking points or operate from its premises, they were assailed as unfair and biased.

The conservative campaign against journalism as “liberal media” was Leninist in its assumption that truth and fact were inherently sectarian and instrumental. Acting on this premise, the press was subjected to constant and elaborate campaigns of intimidation. The administration enjoyed unprecedented success. Not a single report in any major newspaper or on the broadcast news networks covered the campaign of intimidation, as the press had once readily reported on Nixon’s early effort, progenitor of the current strategy….

Operationally, within the White House, the Office of the Vice President controlled foreign policy, making the National Security Council its auxiliary, and the flow of information to the president. No vice president was ever as powerful.

Bush was unusually incurious and passive in seeking facts. He never demanded worst-case scenarios. His circle of advisers was tightly restricted. Only a select few of the White House staff were permitted to see him, much less interact with him. He made no effort to establish independent sources of information. He never circulated to his staff articles that sparked a policy interest in him. When his support in public opinion declined, he soaked up the flattery of his aides that the people had momentarily lapsed in their appreciation of his heroic strength and vision….

Bush’s presidency was uniquely radical in its elevation of absolute executive power, dismissal of the other branches of government, contempt for law, dominant power of the vice president, networks of ideological cadres, principle of unaccountability, stifling of internal debate, reliance on one party rule, and overtly political use of war. Never before had a president shown disdain for science and sought to batter down the wall of separation between church and state. None of it seemed in the offing upon Bush’s inauguration in 2001. Yet these actions were not sudden impulses, spontaneous reactions or accidental gestures. They were based on deliberate decisions intended to change the presidency and government fundamentally and forever.