Little Praise and Much Criticism of Vincent Bugliosi's The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder

When I first saw The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder at the bookstore, I thought it was going to be the perfect summer read, especially since I was externing for a federal judge at the time. Though the main text of the book spans 249 pages, I finally had to stop at page 182. That's right; I never made it past that page. I just simply couldn't go on anymore.

At first, this book posed an exhilarating read, beginning with a fabulous quote by Senator Hiram Johnson (1917): "The first casualty when war comes is the truth."

I even felt hopeful while perusing the introduction, where Bugliosi describes at length his abilities to think critically: "We're talking about the fact that most people see what they expect to see, what they want to see, what they've been told to see, what conventional wisdom tells them to see, not what is right in front of them... But... I seem to naturally... see what's in front of me completely uninfluenced by the clothing (reputation, hoopla...)."

His introduction leaves much to be desired, however, in terms of how Bugliosi writes about the war, politics, and even the law.

Now, I know that women and men do not serve in the military in equal numbers or percentages. However, not once in the 182 pages that I could stand reading did Bugliosi refer to U.S. soldiers as anything other than men. The only time I saw soldiers referred to as men as well as women was when Bugliosi was quoting someone else.

The fact that women soldiers are completely invisible in this book makes me wonder how capable Bugliosi is of "naturally seeing what is in front of him" without regard to how he and the rest of society have been told to see gender in the military.

Women soldiers' invisibility is an especially pressing issue because they are often raped by our own male soldiers. According to Ann Wright, the Department of Defense's statistics report that one of every three women U.S. soldiers are sexually assaulted--not by supposed infidels, but by U.S. male soldiers![i]

Wright continues, "[E]ven more alarming, are deaths of women soldiers in Iraq, and in the United States, following rape. The military has characterized each of the deaths of women who were first sexually assaulted as deaths from 'non-combat related injuries,' and then added 'suicide'."

As CNN quoted in one of its articles, "When our sons and daughters put their lives on the line to defend the rest of us, the last thing they should fear is being attacked by one of our own."[ii]

Women, and the fact that women do serve our nation, matter. Bugliosi's utter failure to recognize this in his book is as telling as it is troublesome.

There are, however, some good aspects to The Prosecution.

Bugliosi rightly and sufficiently paints George W. Bush as the uppity, selfish, spoiled little brat that he really is. Part I does a nice job of this, and I didn't even know half of these facts before reading the book. Yet, the citations for some of the author's claims seem to be incomplete at best, missing at worst. While Bugliosi does cite to newspaper and some magazine articles, when it comes to documents that he somehow had access to, we are not given any ways to read the same information, if possible.

Bugliosi articulates the legalities of what it would take to put Bush behind bars, but there are a couple problems here. First, the foundation of his claim is that Bush lied to the American people. As a law student, I have yet to encounter any law or case that criminalizes lying to the public. If such a law exists, it would be nice to know about it.

Second, since the prosecution of the president is the very issue and title of the book, Bugliosi's work could have been condensed to a 30 to 60 page law journal article without leaving out important background information. The rest of the book is polemical nonsense, which weakens the author's argument. For this reason, reading The Prosecution was as annoying as it is to listen to AM radio.

Finally, the hypothetical "capable prosecutor" that Bugliosi refers to in chapter four is, apparently, a man. How easy would it have been to simply write "he/she" instead of just "he?" Sexist apologists will retort, "Well, everyone knows that 'he' refers to both men and women. It's short for 'human'."

However, when it comes to laws and rights, social acceptance and education, literature and art, "he" has never included women. He means exactly what it sounds like: namely, men and only men.

The most heart-wrenching and only redeeming portion of The Prosecution is the photographic brief in the middle of the book following page 142. It actually brought me to tears. The photos begin with flag-covered caskets, proceed to U.S. grave sites and grieving Iraqi men and women displaying emotional terror brought on by death and loss, and finish with our shameful president laughing, vacationing, and black-tie-affairing.

What should be a moving work and, perhaps, one of the most important books of our time has, instead, turned out to be yet another poorly-written, polemical, sexist, and heterosexist piece. Maybe next time, Bugliosi will be able to see what should naturally be in front of him: gender.

[i] See http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/04/28/8564/.

[ii] See http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/07/31/military.sexabuse/index.html?imw=Y. I also recommend reading http://community.feministing.com/2008/08/female-soldiers-raped-silenced.html.