Book of the Month: Family of Secrets

June's book of the month is Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years by Russ Baker.

Think you know George Dubya Bush? Think you know his daddy, Old Number 41? Junior was a swaggering half-moron serial liar and Poppy was pretty much an amiable preppy dipshit, both of whom struggled to string together enough words to make a comprehensible sentence, right?

Well, it turns out we don't know Dick about the Bush Family Evil Empire.

The Bush Family Evil Empire. The BFEE. That's a phrase that I've used a lot since I started this blog six years ago, but I really didn't know how true it really was until I read this book.

Baker, an investigative journalist, skillfully takes us back to the early days of the Bush dynasty and shows the shady, extraordinarily complex, and continuing, ties between the Bush family and the intelligence empire, starting even before the famous OSS and its notorious offspring, the CIA.

Everyone knows that George H. W. Bush was head of the CIA during the Ford Administration, but it's been a well-kept secret that he was involved with The Company years earlier. There's a strange web surrounding the Bush family, Big Oil, the Saudi royal family, and various extra-legal and sinister happenings in the world, and Baker's well-researched and well-footnoted book nails all of them.

Including Poppy Bush's mysterious phone call to the FBI office in Houston shortly after the JFK assassination in which he fingers a local Republican party gofer as being responsible. What the fuck? was also my initial response to learning this little fact, but Baker carefully accounts for the reasons behind this strange call.

The only two people who couldn't remember where they were when JFK was shot were ... E. Howard Hunt and George Bush the senior. Interesting, isn't it? Go ahead and ask anyone you know who is over 62 or so where they were when JFK was shot and I'll bet you that everyone will remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they got the news. (Within reason, of course, so I don't want anybody to come back and say that they asked their senile and/or crazy Aunt Edna, who doesn't even know her own name...)

There's also an FBI memo from J. Edgar himself which puts George Bush in the CIA at the time of the assassination, a fact which the family, for various reasons, has taken great pains to hide.

The book also shows that Bush's Brain, aka Karl Rove, was affiliated with the Bush family from very early on, despite the stories that we've been fed, and that the media were -- and still are -- a bunch of lapdogs when it comes to coverage of the Bush family. It was so easy for the family to dismiss pretty much anything negative -- the whole Bush AWOL fiasco comes to mind -- as being just another "conspiracy theory".

Remember, in Orwell's 1984, the key to control of thought was control of the language. "Conspiracy theory" is a short and grabby way of dismissing anyone who asks hard questions about the major discrepancies in the whole Bush Family Dynasty biography.

This book is a major exposé of the crimes of the Bush family, and I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to achieve a major understanding of the evil reach, the invisible manipulations and secret machinations of one of the most powerful political families the world has ever known.