Indecision Points

The London Review of Books checks out President G.W. Bush's memoir, Decision Points:

Occasionally, someone on Team DP will insert a lyrical phrase - the tears on the begrimed faces of the 9/11 relief workers 'cutting a path through the soot like rivulets through a desert' - but most of the prose sounds like this:

"I told Margaret and Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Bolten that I considered this a far-reaching decision. I laid out a process for making it. I would clarify my guiding principles, listen to experts on all sides of the debate, reach a tentative conclusion, and run it past knowledgeable people. After finalising a decision, I would explain it to the American people. Finally, I would set up a process to ensure that my policy was implemented."

There are nearly 500 pages of this...

A spot of Foucauldian analysis follows of Team DP, that being the authorial voice in both print and presidency: "There are no decision points in Decision Points... [instead] a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears."

'Damn right,' I said [LRB via Metafilter]

• [RenaldoSugarbush]

  DP is what Cheney and Rummy did to planet earth.

  I am rather surprised that Bush’s memoirs didn’t have a coloring section.

• [mdh]

  Riveting, and I mean like forcing hot steel ingots into your eyeballs.

• [TheCrawNotTheCraw]

  “I told Margaret and Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Bolten that I considered this a far-reaching decision. I laid out a process for making it. I would clarify my guiding principles, listen to experts on all sides of the debate, reach a tentative conclusion, and run it past knowledgeable people. After finalising a decision, I would explain it to the American people. Finally, I would set up a process to ensure that my policy was implemented.”

  Zzzzz… More effective than Xanax and Nembutal…

• [Modusoperandi]

  Oh, come on! He’s The Deciderer, not The Writerer!

• [Anonymous]

  DP = double penetration

  just saying

• [benher]

  Wow… this guy really is… like… the decider. Like, I mean, he really knows how to decide things you know?

• [Jack Fear]

  I was looking for Mark Twain’s autobiography to give as Christmas gift, but there wasn’t a copy to be had for love nor money in any store within an hour’s drive of me. a clerk at Borders told me, with a mixture of regret and delight, that they couldn’t keep it on the shelves. There were, however, great unsold stacks of Decision Points everywhere I went.

  Twain didn’t think much of our species, but I must admit the revelation of the relative levels of demand for these two books restored my faith in humanity just a tad.

• [Fett101]

  Don’t be so hopeful yet. Amazon has Twain at #2, on the list for 80 days, while Decision Point is at #3, on the list for 117 days.

  Also, The New York Times has Decision Point at #1 and Twain at #3.

  • [EH]

    Also, The New York Times has Decision Point at #1 and Twain at #3.

    That’s because everybody who benefited from Bush’s term in office each bought 10,000 copies apiece.

• [TEKNA2007]

  Just when I was feeling really lousy about the unfulfilled potential of the current administration, I hear the voice of the previous officeholder, explaining in a radio interview how he did in fact order the commission of war crimes, reminding me of how glad I was to see him go.

  “You’re damn right I did.” Wasn’t that in “A Few Good Men”?

  I do feel sorry for him. Clearly not up to a very difficult job.

• [Anonymous]

  That’s an interesting excerpt. I grade TOEFL tests – that’s how foreigners with a weak grasp of English are taught to construct a meaningful paragraph, with those same “connecting” words and phrases. Study aide, anyone?

• [MadRat]

  I haven’t read W’s book and don’t plan to, but here’s a headline from The Daily Mail: “We misunderestimated him: Bush’s memoir sells 2m copies in a month – nearly as many as Bill Clinton’s sold in six years” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1341229/Bushs-memoir-sells-2MILLION-copies-just-month–nearly-Bill-Clintons-sold-years.html

  • [Halloween Jack]

    Not much of a comparison there. Clinton’s book is nearly twice as long, and he didn’t have the advantage of doing publicity for it during a midterm election season in which his successor was being blamed for all of America’s problems. Also, W’s book is heavily discounted by Amazon at the moment.

  • [mdh]

    Are you aware that Dr. Seuss also regularly outsells Dr. Martin Luther King?

  • [hobomike]

    This makes sense. The Left is full of curious, learned people who will read almost anything, especially for a few laughs, and this includes DP. And this probably the one of the very few books the Right will bother buying and cracking open, aside from that other, “Good” book.

• [Anonymous]

  I had low expectations for this book from the second word, and W’s voice was the cause. By “second word” I mean the second word in the title. There is already a name for “decision points” — they’re called “decisions”. I am amazed the former president’s level of verbal eloquence was detectable in so few words.

  • [TheCrawNotTheCraw]

    Your emphasis of the word “Points” in the title reminds me of an aspect of the Nixon Administration’s testimony which was (rightly) ridiculed during the Watergate Investigation:

    When discussing what they were doing, Administration personel started using the phrase, “at this (or that) point in time…”

    A commentator finally observed that (I’m paraphrasing) since time doesn’t repeat itself, the phrase “at this point in time” is so much puffery, and they should have just said, “at this time.”

    But they were such a arrogant, pompous bunch.