Jacob Weisberg, _The Bush Tragedy_

HAVING DECIDED THAT I needed to read at least one volume from the groaning shelf of second-term Bush exposés (having read Kevin Phillips's American Dynasty in the first term), I went for this one largely because I was intrigued by the Bush=Prince Hal thesis as noted in a review of the book.

It works well enough.  Scapegrace son, wasted opportunities, father's disappointment, then the great peripateia, son ascends throne, wins big battle...Baghdad=Agincourt? Yes, in a way. Weisberg makes the useful point that though Shakespeare's Henry V ends on a note of triumph, the long-term post-Agincourt story was of a long, futile war that fostered bloody civil dissension in England.

Weisberg sees George W.'s presidency as a quasi-Oedipal struggle not only to prove his father was and always had been wrong about him, but also to be as unlike his father as possible -- to be bold instead of prudent, intuitive rather than deliberative, a Baptist shouter rather than an Episcopalian mumbler, Texas rather than Connecticut.  The tragedy is that he succeeded so utterly in this pursuit as to damn near ruin the country.

There's a missing ingredient to the thesis, though -- Falstaff. Weisberg provides skillful quick sketches of Rumsfeld, Rove, and Cheney in the book, but do they even as an ensemble begin to add up to a figure as compelling, as human, as worth risking one's birthright for as Falstaff is?  Oh, man.  Reading about Falstaff, you mourn having to leave his company for even five minutes, while with Bush's dark triumvirate you feel five minutes with them would be enough for five lifetimes.

I started the book in the summer, finished it after the election, by which time it seemed the gothic chronicle of a gruesome, benighted but mercifully vanished era.