The Skimmer

By Gilbert Cruz

The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder

By Vincent Bugliosi; 344 pages

It's difficult to imagine a more inflammatory book title that wouldn't result in a visit from the Secret Service. Bugliosi, a star prosecutor and author of the Manson family true-crime best-seller Helter Skelter, aims to inflame. He wants the American public to finally get furious over the Bush Administration's handling of the Iraq war. He certainly is, and boy does it show: his pages are chock-full of insults (Bush is "devoid of any character"), exclamations ("It's enough to make the cat cry") and italics--just so you get it! Bugliosi is well aware of his largest hurdle: convincing readers that a President can be tried for murder in a U.S. court. He methodically lays out his case--Bush deliberately lied in bringing the nation to war and is thus responsible for the deaths of more than 4,000 American soldiers--with piles of evidence from public sources, as well as legal theory and precedent. The resulting work makes a fascinating law-school exercise but suffers from a thundering repetitiveness that exhausts as much as it informs.

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