Vincent Bugliosi is the guy I go to when I want murderers put away. His book Outrage, on the O. J. Simpson trial, showed me in undeniable terms how badly the prosecution had bobbled what should have been a slam-dunk case… .And showed me how O. J. should have been tried. Helter Skelter remains one of the high water marks in taking a very difficult case – remember, Manson didn’t kill anyone, his followers did – and making it stick.

So when I read about his new book, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, I was excited. Vincent has a way of boiling complex things down to pretty simple, almost irrefutable arguments – his book No Island of Sanity explained very clearly why the Paula Jones case was a travesty of justice. (Paula Jones certainly had a right to bring suit against Bill Clinton – but in a country where soldiers routinely get deferrals of civil suits until the end of their term because the army doesn’t want the soldiers to be distracted in the field, the leader of the most powerful country in the world has to spend his days distracted emotionally and physically by the preparations for a trial that could wait. It’s not a murder case, but rather a private litigation; it certainly could have been delayed three years.)

Given that the man had a) written extensively upon the details of the Presidency, and b) knows how to prosecute for murder, I was looking for an iron-clad case that would tell me why George Bush is different from every other President who’s brought the country into an unwise war (and anyone who’s said, “The facts weren’t good enough” should look into the Spanish-American war sometime).

Unfortunately, Vincent may be an expert at prosecuting murderers and interrogating witnesses, but he’s never argued against Dubya supporters in a blog.

This is the sloppiest I’ve ever seen him write – it’s a ranting, vitriolic book designed to preach to the choir of Bush supporters, but useless to anyone else. Worse, he seems to think that he’s the only one who’s really investigated the bad things that Bush has done, telling us that Bush distorted the facts about Nigerian yellowcake for his State of the Union address as though we’ve never heard it before.

I loved Outrage because it really talked, in detail, about the facts and how they mattered to the case. This book, however, spends an astonishing fourteen pages arguing that “George Bush doesn’t care about America” by, of all things, repeatedly discussing photos of George Bush smiling broadly. Maybe that’s the sort of thing that would sway a jury, but to me it just stank of personal vendetta. And I don’t like George Bush, and I don’t think he cares about America (or anything) that much.

The evidence here is sloppy. Even though the most cursory blog trawl would tell you that the figure of “100,000 Iraqis dead” is a pretty nebulous number in hot dispute, Bugliosi refers to it repeatedly without ever really looking into whether that’s an accurate figure or not. There’s a lot of evidence given from ex-government employees like Richard Clarke, but the Republicans have kicked up so much smoke about Clarke’s reliability and honesty that it’s hard to say whether what Clarke says is true. Now, I believe that what Clarke says is true, sure, but Bugliosi doesn’t seem aware of the smear campaign and starts out with the assumption that we think Clarke and his confederates are noble, upstanding citizens.

It’s as though he wrote this without even realizing that there’s a propaganda campaign waged by the other side, and so he doesn’t take the Fox News side of things seriously to even dismiss.

The whole book is like this. It cites facts I’ve already heard, without really rebutting the Republican spin machine or knitting them together into a coherent whole. What we wind up with is a rah-rah speech for the converted.

Plus, he seems to be living in some sort of bubble zone. One of the reasons I liked No Island of Sanity so much is that it really looked at the chilling consequences of allowing private citizens to file lawsuits against a standing President at any time. (Don’t like your President of choice? Sue him for something and hope the Supreme Court agrees with you! Paralyze the bastard!)

However, the equally chilling idea that a President could be put to death for leading the country into a war isn’t discussed at all. Yes, Bush is someone who twisted the facts. But do you honestly believe that once that precedent is set, someone wouldn’t try to prosecute every President for any war started, no matter how just? And while there’s a case to be made that every President perhaps should risk his own life a little if he thinks the soldiers should die for it, a) that case isn’t made at all here, and b) the question of bankrupting almost every ex-President with tons of lawsuits and appeals is going to be an issue going forward.

If I were a judge, I wouldn’t want to start that sort of thing. Yet Bugliosi blithely ignores this idea and continues as though he’s giving a blueprint for younger, more ambitious lawyers.

Furthermore, he discusses the trial as though it’s happening. Forgetting the lessons of Scooter Libby – who, contrary to popular belief, did not crumble and point the finger at Cheney when the jailors came knockin’ – he says this regarding a plea bargain when the “murder trial” for Bush comes up:

“…Cheney is a sniveling coward who did everything possible to keep out of harm’s way in the Vietnam war, so certainly he’s not going to risk his life for Bush. Rove would probably drop to his knees and start crying like a baby, begging for mercy. What I’m saying is that even people of character aren’t usually loyal to each other when their life is on the line. But these moral weaklings will probably sing like canaries against each other, since they all appear to be almost amoral individuals who are devoid of any character.”

This is followed by a truly embarrassing cross-section of George Bush where Bugliosi tells you what he’d say, and then what George Bush would say, and then what he’d say in response to that to really show that coward up – an imaginary conversation where even I could come up with different answers for Dubya that would derail his whole line of thought.

In the end, the book degenerates into an embarrassing tirade about how America used to be great and isn’t any more. Again, could be done well. Certainly we’ve got a lot of arrogance in our country. But when, as part of the case against America’s current greatness, he starts bitching about how we used to have great songs nominated for the Oscars and now we had this tuneless rap song win in 2005, he sounds like an old crank.

It’s not that Bugliosi is without points. There’s a great section where he dismantles the idea that Bush is tough on terrorism quite handily, pointing out that really, Bush should get no credit for going after Bin Laden – does anyone seriously think that in the wake of 3,000 Americans dead, as the successor to an administration that had developed a special forces team devoted to hunting Bin Laden down, Gore would have sat on his thumbs? He talks about all the things that any President would have been forced to do by political pressure, and how Bush got an uncanny amount of credit for what was, before Iraq, his biggest failure as a President.

But the book as a whole? A large, angry rant. I wanted an airtight case, constructed slowly from the ground up until there was no other choice but to see this as a murder case; what I got was a lot of what I already knew, infuriating but not enough where I’d convict as a jury.

Gini thinks the 1,400 page JFK book made Vincent want to take a break from thorough reporting. I think that Bugliosi’s own personal distaste for the President, which I share, has colored his views and made his arguments seem like they’re really compelling to outsiders when really, they only make sense when you’re already standing in his camp.

Either way, it’s definitely his most disappointing book. Not recommended for anyone but the most unfamiliar with the runup to the Iraqi war, and even then you'll likely find the "Don't you hate him?" tone a turnoff.

(Tell me I'm full of it)