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George Bush Book 'Decision Points' Lifted From Advisers' Books

Your Star said:
It's actually Real Time, and I can't wait until it comes back. Maher is hillarious.
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Oh you're right! Politically Incorrect was the name of his older show that Christine O'Donnell was on.
 
This is the kind of review you get from Huffington post if you're a liberal, friend to Soros and you are not George Bush. It's full of pandering and not one snarky comment. They couldn't even leave Bush out of AG"s review. Geez...They are still saying Bush stole the election.


Gore has been engaged in that truth-telling for more than two decades, and one mark of his greatness is that he's kept up with the science. Twice in this volume he invokes the figure 350, as in parts per million co2, an inconvenient new truth that our best scientists have been setting forward as the maximum amount of carbon that the atmosphere can safely contain. It would have been easy for Gore to punt on the cutting edge stuff--easier to stick within the safe confines of the UN negotiation process. But he recognizes the need for active, dramatic campaigning on these issues--my only sadness with this book is that he doesn't bring more of that expertise to bear. A man who has run and won national campaigns (even if he didn't get the office to which he'd been elected) has much useful to say about how to drive these points home with ordinary voters.
Al Gore's Our Choice: Progressive Book Club Review
 
I love how the libbies are all in a knot over Bush using a ghost writer, when it's common practice in politics and elsewhere. I doubt they understand the concept of ghostwriting fully. The ghost writer does NOT write the book on their own, with no input from the credited author. It's a collaboration. A 'necessary evil', if you will, due to time constraints of the industry.

Of course, I doubt the libbes will agree... ghostwriting is lying! he's not even smart enough to write his own book! etc etc etc.

A comparison of Ayers and Obama writings was done using techniques called QSUM (Cumulative Sum Technique) and FRES (Fleish Reading Ease Score). Through these techniques and direct textual comparisons of Obama's 'Dreams of My Father' and Ayers 'Fugitive Days', it appears very likely that Ayer's was the ghost writer for Obama.
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Ghostwriting and the political book culture - Los Angeles Times
From U.S. Grant to Eleanor Roosevelt to Laura Bush and many others, their own words are often put on the page by others.

This might seem like a story designed to rally supporters of serious writing and thinking: A political figure who actually crafts her own words, who stands up to lazy editors and stands on her convictions. But what would those supporters make of Roosevelt's various assistants? To complete "This I Remember," she relied on them not only to edit and offer advice but to dig through her files for anecdotes and stories, to compile questions to spur her memory — even to organize and outline her responses.

The point is, even politicians who write their own books don't write them alone, and we'd be better off looking past ghostwriting to the real problems behind political books.
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Every political book, in other words, involves a degree of collaboration. But so does every book, period. This should be easier to see today, when many works are less weighty, well-reasoned tomes than multimedia launching platforms. And yet you can always find someone, usually a professional writer, willing to bash ghostwriting. These critics may start by pointing out how nice it is when politicians write their own books (and I agree, when the politician can write a good book). But their attacks quickly turn visceral. And ghostwriting quickly turns into a symbol of our political and cultural decline.
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With all of these external factors (and this is just a partial list), political ghostwriting becomes a byproduct not of laziness but of logistics. It's a symptom, not a disease. After all, Laura Bush, one of our more literate and literary first ladies, turned to a ghostwriter while working on her new memoir, "Spoken from the Heart." Lyric Winik, Bush writes in her acknowledgments, "helped me put my story into words." If Bush needed the help, what political figure wouldn't?
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Just last month, it came out that Winik also will be helping Scott Brown with his new book (due in early 2011). But it's far more telling that Bush and Brown share another connection: Robert Barnett, the D.C. mega agent who has secured multimillion-dollar book deals for Sarah Palin, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, both Clintons and many, many more.
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Ghost Stories | The American Prospect
George Washington's most famous speech, the Farewell Address (1796), wasn't actually a speech -- it appeared, over the course of a few weeks, in almost every American newspaper. The address wasn't Washington's, either. Alexander Hamilton, with assists from Washington and James Madison, did most of the writing.
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I guess Washington was just too lazy or stupid to write it himself. :rolleyes:

In the years after Washington's death, readers continued to assume that the first president alone had written the Farewell Address. By 1810, though, Hamilton's authorship was being noted in private letters and public gossip
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Hmmm, more insidious ghost writing. How sad for America.

Warren Harding, the first president to employ a full-time ghostwriter.
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Must have been a moron, huh.

Franklin D. Roosevelt pioneered the ghostwriting-by-committee approach -- historians still argue about which aide coined the "new deal" phrase -- but, for his first inaugural, he looked to one man: Raymond Moley. Moley typed up a draft and, the next night, revised it with Roosevelt, watching as the president-elect copied it onto a legal pad. When they finished, Moley threw his initial text into the fireplace and said, "This is your speech now."
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FDR too? Say it ain't so!

By 1927, when the Authors' League held a meeting on ghostwritten celebrity books, the consensus was that "the public was at one time completely credulous on the point. Now it seems unlikely that it believes in any of the noted athletes, singers or politicians who break out in print."
For readers, in other words, a political book's impact matters more than its authorship -- and nowhere was this clearer than during the postwar period, which saw a series of popular political books, all best-sellers, all instrumental in shaping their authors' careers. Dwight Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe (1948), Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative (1960), and Richard Nixon's Six Crises (1962) relied on ghostwriters to varying degrees; no one cared. Jimmy Carter wrote Why Not the Best? (1975) without any help; no one cared about that, either.
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Almost forgot this part...

Indeed, most recent attempts to scandalize ghostwriting reflect partisan motives or divisive personalities more than any underlying anxieties about ghostwriting. When Hillary Clinton opted not to thank her ghostwriter in the acknowledgments of It Takes a Village (1996), it became a mini crisis; when Howard Dean repeated her mistake in Winning Back America (2003), only Newsweek noticed.
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That sound like anyone we know?

And LOOK! Demmies use ghostwriters too! I guess they are just to lazy to do it themselves, right folks?
 
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The best part is, we aren't even treated to the information regarding how the book is formatted. If it has citations and references, it is standard writing. By reading this article, one gets the impression that it should constantly be referred to in the first person, with no explicit references. All memoirs would be written in the style of Catherine the Great.

This is lazy writing, and people like pbrauer are ironically illiterate when it comes to scholarly work or writing while using the same trite stereotypes of George W. Bush. I suppose it would still make for good lotion for liberals to wank to.
 
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Fiddytree said:
The best part is, we aren't even treated to the information regarding how the book is formatted. If it has citations and references, it is standard writing.
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Certainly is a very good point. It's not like the writer gives us any reason to impart the benefit of the doubt to him, either.
 
Fiddytree said:
The best part is, we aren't even treated to the information regarding how the book is formatted. If it has citations and references, it is standard writing. By reading this article, one gets the impression that it should constantly be referred to in the first person, with no explicit references. All memoirs would be written in the style of Catherine the Great.

This is lazy writing, and people like pbrauer are ironically illiterate when it comes to scholarly work or writing while using the same trite stereotypes of George W. Bush.
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Not even lazy writing. The HuffPost column is just a pure partisan hack piece. Those entrenched on the Left get a chubby reading it because anything that diminishes/ridicules Bush is like candy.

Thought the NY Times actually did a reasonable balanced job of reviewing the Decision Points memoir. Certainly didn't give it accolades, but it seems like a balanced critique. (Haven't read the book yet myself, so I am giving them (NYT) the benefit of the doubt...)

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/books/04book.html


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Whovian @ A comparison of Ayers and Obama writings was done using techniques called QSUM (Cumulative Sum Technique) and FRES (Fleish Reading Ease Score). Through these techniques and direct textual comparisons of Obama's 'Dreams of My Father' and Ayers 'Fugitive Days', it appears very likely that Ayer's was the ghost writer for Obama.


Ayers was just some guy in Obama's neighborhood. ;)
 
Harshaw said:
Certainly is a very good point. It's not like the writer gives us any reason to impart the benefit of the doubt to him, either.
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I'm more convinced that what could have happened is that there are references and that because of that the writers back-tracked and grabbed the same information contained on that page from the Woodward text or elsewhere.

I'm not entirely convinced that the authors of the reviews are intellectually seeing the connection between the writings of Woodward, Feith, or anyone else. I've seen many journalists through my studies take a few shortcuts to arrive at a somewhat safe conclusion, or at least one that is in the realm of acceptability for the masses. It takes too much time for them to do otherwise.
 
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Cole said:
Not even lazy writing. The HuffPost column is just a pure partisan hack piece.
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If someone expected different from Puffington, they lack a critical mind.

I'm a bit disappointed that this forum would discuss a Puff produced piece of propaganda; but hey, it's the internet.


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Where's all the liberal outrage at the Clinton's for using ghost writers? All the other liberal politicians who've done it. Where?

Oh... wait... I forgot... it's only lazy writing if you have an R after your name.
 
almost 4 hours, and not a single lin has 'explained' why 'this is different' in regards to the outrage that Bush used a ghostwriter, as did both Clintons, and a whole host of other politicians on BOTH sides of the great divide.

I smell their fear.
 
Whovian said:
almost 4 hours, and not a single lin has 'explained' why 'this is different' in regards to the outrage that Bush used a ghostwriter, as did both Clintons, and a whole host of other politicians on BOTH sides of the great divide.

I smell their fear.
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Read the thread again, Whooey. The only person here with their panties in a bunch about ghostwriters is you. :doh
 
Glinda said:
Read the thread again, Whooey. The only person here with their panties in a bunch about ghostwriters is you. :doh
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Ghostwriters was the entire point of the thread....


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I gotcha... heh, heh...

George_Bush_Laughing.jpg
 
Cole said:
Ghostwriters was the entire point of the thread....


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I thought the point was it was a poorly writen book period, that it was done by a ghost writer makes it even worse ( you would expect a ghost writer to due a better job then a former politician
 
Harshaw said:
It IS rather difficult to take this article seriously when it's so filled through with sneering nastiness and massively stolen bases. And in this sentence, we get quite a bit of both:



In this, the guy assumes that any passages which correspond to things in, say, Tommy Franks's memoir must have been taken from a Google search and not from a perusal of the book itself. He repeats this charge a few times throughout the article.

And then there's the snotty adding of the "" at the end of "internet."

And so on. This kind of juvenility is rife throughout the whole thing.

I'm sure this fits pbrauer's definition of "serious journalism," but it's nothing more than a poorly-constructed hit piece. It's interesting that Bush himself, the man this jagoff obviously feels so superior to, would never be so ridiculously childish or petty.
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Journolists will be Journolists.

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Like his take on the massive election defeat:
Bill Maher:
What does that tell you? You know, it tells me that this election was lost when Obama didn’t back the public option. To me, that was the one key thing that said to the people – You know what? This is no different than the Al Gore Democrats, the old Al Gore playbook. "Let’s run from our achievements. And let’s not stand for what we believe in."
Yes Bill.
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This is your brain on drugs.
One of the worst thing in the world is to fool yourself. He's a Meister. He's a fool who fools himself repeatedly.

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zimmer said:
This is your brain on drugs.
One of the worst thing in the world is to fool yourself. He's a Meister. He's a fool who fools himself repeatedly.

.
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Hey! Whats wrong with being a meister? :mrgreen:
 
spud_meister said:
Hey! Whats wrong with being a meister? :mrgreen:
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He's not your kind of Meister Spud. Though we don't agree about much... you're the kind of Meister we all can have a great time with.

No surprise... I haven't met an Aussie I didn't like. Great, funny, fun loving characters whether you agree with them or not.

Maher is an obnoxious, deluded fool.

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pbrauer said:
My post was in response to another poster; it's pretty self explanatory. :roll:
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You are one of the least credible posters around here. When you criticize Bush with your Media Matters style, no one is impressed. There is usually little truth in your allegations.
 
Lord Tammerlain said:
I thought the point was it was a poorly writen book period, that it was done by a ghost writer makes it even worse ( you would expect a ghost writer to due a better job then a former politician
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It seems to capture the style of the President's perspective and it is carried in the style of the President himself. This is exactly what a Presidential speechwriter is supposed to do: capture the President accurately.
 
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