Even for this lawyer, it's as hard to read Vincent Bugliosi as his fellow lawyer/author Alan Dershowitz. So tendentious is their approach to reasoned discourse that you feel that seated across from them at lunch, you'd be lifted half out of your seat by your tie before coffee arrived.
Bugliosi, who's been commanding public attention since his involvement in the Charles Manson trial led to his best-selling book, Helter Skelter, knows that even many diehard George Bush critics will dismiss, out of hand, the idea that the President ought to be tried for murder because of his role in the Iraqi war. So, in The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, he sets the table by carefully conditioning his readers to disabuse themselves of the notion that no matter how misdirected George Bush was in the 2003 runup to war and even if he lied about the WMDs, that it's unthinkable that an American president could, like Saddam Hussein, face conviction for killing thousands. It's just not the American way.
The manner in which wealth and power have anesthetized Americans to government corruption all around them leads Bugliosi to conclude that "I do not believe that America is a great nation anymore." He bases his opinion on other nations' opinion of us, on Kenneth Starr's ability run roughshod in trying to destroy an American president over his private sexual dalliances, on public unpopularity towards helping the poor, and on our government's failure to provide universal health care.
His conclusion is sobering and persuasive until he concludes that another major reason for America's decline is that while European nations have "virtually discarded organized religion," America "is the only nation in the Western world....that is becoming more religious." He then goes on basically to equate organized religion with born-again fundamentalism. I'm sure the scores of millions of mainstream, practicing American Catholics, Protestants, Jews and Muslims would recoil from that conclusion.
