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Rant 656: Three Books--One Worth Your Time

10/8/2021

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​Three blockbuster books about the inner workings of government have recently been released. One is definitely worth your time.
 
I’ll Take Your Questions Now: What I Saw at the Trump White House, by former Trump toady and shill, Stephanie Grisham, can best be described as a snarky, pathetic recollection of revelations about pathetic people by a pathetic person. Grisham, you recall, was one of Trump’s four press secretaries, all of whom contributed to dramatically lowering the bar for the job. In her year holding down that discredited position, she never took a single question from the media because she never held a single press conference. Instead, she was consumed by fear of having to voice a daily dose of Trump’s lies about everything. She also served as Melania Trump’s chief of staff and communications director and has a lot of gossipy things to say about history’s most inconsequential first lady. Grisham’s book is a lame attempt to rehabilitate her forever-tainted image while squeezing some bucks out of hard-working Americans after selling her soul for peanuts. Don’t waste your money or your time on this poorly written nothingburger.
 
Peril, by Bob Woodward and Woodward wannabe, Robert Costa, reveals a bevy of shocking details about Trump’s unrivaled corruption and contamination of the highest office in the land. These two exceptional Washington Post journalists managed to squeeze out extraordinary items of information about what loathsome wretches Trump and his team of bootlicking mediocrities were, items that should upset every American and make us all pine for the day these criminals finally get their comeuppance. But we already know that the former president and current democracy slayer is evil incarnate and abused his office like no one before. Consequently, we learn little that is really new from this book. Don’t bother reading it. You already know all the juiciest stuff from news reports. Simply take away the underlying message: the only way to avoid a total catastrophe in the near term is to put Trump and his team of troublemakers behind bars…and soon.
 
The Afghanistan Papers, by Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock in contrast, is a must-read for every American. It should be required reading in every school, university and military war and command and general staff college. The book details with painful precision the folly and duplicity that three presidents perpetrated in bogging America down in an unwinnable war and the cascade of lies they and their people barraged Congress and the American people with for 20 years. If you thought the Pentagon Papers, the secret files that hid the truth about the Vietnam War, were shocking and appalling, The Afghanistan Papers will have you wanting to make certain that George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump are somehow called to account for their betrayal of the soldiers they sent to fight and die in Afghanistan and the tens of thousands of innocent Afghans who died due to their contempt for the American public. Read this book.
 
Dick Hermann
October 8, 2021

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    Author

    Richard Hermann is the author of thirteen books, including Encounters: Ten Appointments with History and, most recently, Mother's Century: A Survivor, Her People and Her Times. Soon to be released is his upcoming Close Encounters with the Cold War, a personal reflection on growing up in the nuclear age. He is a former law professor and entrepreneur, and the founder and president of Federal Reports, Inc., a legal information and consulting firm that was sold in 2007. He has degrees from Yale University, the New School University, Cornell Law School and the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General’s School. He lives with his wife, Anne, and extraordinary dog, Barkley, in Arlington, Virginia and Canandaigua, New York.

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