Every literate person, and a few Fox News viewers, will be familiar with this trick. Ever since 9/11 ushered in the Orwellian pretext of "Homeland Security", people have been quoting Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." (We should think of this whenever some lout in the street tells the news camera that we shouldn't mind be wiretapped if it "fights terrorism.") More pithily, Coffman juxtaposes Franklin's thought with George Bush's quintessential declaration: "There ought to be limits on freedom."

Just so, many books have already been published exploiting W's short-bus commute to the English language (already five editions of Bushisms, and more expected), but Coffman's selections have a more serious purpose, and a more profound effect. One is reminded that the founding fathers were students of history and rhetoric, yet also men of the real, hard world, which they had come up against in their practices, businesses and on their plantations. They recalled the nightmarish religious wars in Europe and they knew first hand how power curdles character; thus, they separated church and state and tried to distribute power among many. Coffman cites dozens of the founders' Deist aphorisms on the subject, among them Jefferson: "In very country and in very age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses for protection to his own." The Bushites, by contrast, pander nauseatingly to the most primitive idolators of the "inerrant Bible." Says W., "Well, the jury's still out on evolution, you know." This is doubtless linked, in the dim recesses of his psyche, and those of his cultists (perhaps through their credence in one infallible, male, Moral Authority) with notions of the Divine Right to nullify vote counts and lead the Crusade. As he put it, "I trust God speaks through me. Without that I couldn't do my job."

Some will object that such psychologizing puts too much weight on the offhand remarks of an admittedly religious man, but the brilliant effect of Coffman's book is to collect Bush's very similar pronouncements from very different contexts and to contrast them with timeless wisdom, thus highlighting both their centrality to Bush's thought and their error. There are flaws in Coffman's method — he's a bit haphazard in his compilation and organization, and he has an odd habit of citing secondary sources instead of the original context of quotations — but the overall effect is remarkable. That said, it certainly isn't cheering: this is a book to kindle salutary rage.

George W. Bush, I learned here, on at least four separate occasions has publicly joked about being a dictator, seeming to wish wistfully: "A dictatorship would be a lot easier." But when he felt the cause was sufficiently righteous, as in his 2004 executive order to fund faith-based initiatives, he admitted to answering to his Higher Law, and not ours: "It's not a dictatorship in Washington, but I tried to make it one in that one instance." But this admission was too modest. His administration has always confused wishing with planning ("We will be greeted as liberators"); we should not confuse his inchoate plan with an idle or jocular wish. Coffman includes as appendices here the manifestoes of the Neo-Con Project for a New American Century, which, back in the '90s, urged Clinton to attack Iraq immediately. One signatory, Dick Cheney, made every word of that wish come true just as soon as he could.

Also included in this useful volume are snippets of John Yoo's legal advice, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and the Downing Street Memo. In fact, it's hard to imagine a book more potentially useful to a teacher of history, government, or rhetoric than Founders v. Bush. It's bitterly ironic that, in the age of Bush, one would certainly be fired for using it.

— David Essex (djessex@earthlink.net)