Bush's Law: The Remaking of American Justice Book

Eric Lichtblau's framing of the broader issues involving counterterrorism is rather limited. Indeed, his palette holds only two colors: black and white. On one side of his ledger is the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. On the other side is the Bush administration, and never the twain shall meet. Although he is fully aware of the unprecedented challenge posed to national security by the 9/11 attacks, and of the belief within the government that a follow-on attack was a near-certainty, Lichtblau declines to suggest what measures might have been appropriate in place of the ones he labors at every step to condemn as "over-the-top." Cherry-picking facts, tossing in irrelevancies, and engaging in other underhanded methods of argumentation'one could adduce many examples of such methods'Lichtblau fails, all told, to sustain his indictment of the Bush presidency.

There is also a lot of self-inflating gush. Here is Lichtblau describing the epiphany he experienced at the "instant" in which he decided to enter "noble public service" and become a journalist: "There's a moment in time when a fuse is lit, a passion born. The moment is powerful and pungent, and it carries with it the sight and sound and feel of possibilities both real and imagined; the 'swish' of ball hitting net for the first time as a clapping, bounding five-year-old dreams of becoming the next Michael Jordan; the red haze of a sunset bleeding into the greens of a forest on an aspiring artist's debut canvas. . . ."