The other night I saw a Frontline piece, The Darkside: Investigating President Cheney’s role as chief architect of the war on terror and his internal war with George Tenet’s CIA for control over intelligence (you can watch the entire 90-minute show online here)

At least one of the interview clips was with Ron Suskind, whose book the Price of Loyalty had told the story of former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, one of many “insiders” to be brought on board the Bush administration, only to be dismissed or leave (dismissed in case) when they realized that the Bush administration only pretended to have policy. This, as a matter of fact, is exactly what Bruce Bartlett says (Bartlett wrote the book, published in February this year: Impostor : How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy, and is also the author of the book Reganomics. Bartlett says of Bush:

He is simply a partisan Republican, anxious to improve the fortunes of his party, to be sure. But he is perfectly willing to jettison conservative principles at a moment’s notice to achieve that goal
—from here

Here’s a piece from a book review of Bartlett’s book from here:

Bruce Bartlett is a conservative economist with impeccable credentials dating back to the days that he worked for President Reagan’s White House. Bartlett coined the term “Reaganomics”, and wrote a book of the same name. This new book from Bartlett is a critical analysis that the GOP and right-wingers will have a hard time discounting and discrediting (which doesn’t mean that some won’t try). He analyzes the current Bush presidency on many levels, and comes away with the belief that the administration is not only incompetent, but that it is one of the worst examples of crass political opportunism by any presidential administration in American history. He also goes on to explain how the Bush administration has strayed extremely far away from the core principles that conservative Republicans have held sacred for the last forty years.

also, read (or listen to) an interview with him by Terri Gross

All of this is to say that Suskind has been hot on the trail of the Bush adminstration with his biographical journalism through the eyes of some insiders (like O’Neill, and also, an additional piece in conjunction with The Price Of Loyalty describes the experience of John DiUlio, the first “Faith Based Inititative Czar” appointed by Bush , who basically came to the realization that inside the Bush administration , the intiative was a joke, as susequent appointees after DiUlio here were also to discover) . I picked up the latest Suskind book (The One Percent Doctrine) this week, and it seems to be all about what the Frontline piece follows: the Cheney-Rumsfeld machine at work. I haven’t seen any such credits in my initial perusals of the above Frontline links, but it sounds to me in the book’s beginnings that this is probably the case, which makes for a potentially good read, considering Suskind’s writing skills.