What We've Lost: Bush's War on Democracy and Freedom

The editor of Vanity Fair magazine offers a hard-hitting assessment of the current Bush administration and its disastrous effects on America at home and abroad.\nOne of North America’s leading magazine editors, Graydon Carter, addresses the fragile state of U.S. democracy with a searing review of the Bush administration. Carter has expressed his deep dissatisfaction with the current state of the nation in his monthly editor’s letters in Vanity Fair — which have aroused widespread comment — and now provides a sweeping, painstakingly detailed account of the ruinous effects of this president’s actions.\nThe invasion of Iraq, which has proven so costly for the U.S. in lives, dollars and international standing, is only the tip of the iceberg. It is the war at home, a quiet, covert, and in many ways more lasting and damaging war, that makes Carter most wary. In almost every aspect of American life, those in the Bush White House have chipped away at decades’ worth of advances in personal rights, women’s rights, the economy and the environment. They have eroded primary civil liberties in the name of the “war on terror” and have amassed record deficits and trade imbalances. They have rolled back policy in every significant area of environmental protection and have squandered the goodwill of the world in the wake of September 11. America is now widely perceived as one of the most dangerous of countries.\nCarter discusses these topics and many more with great cogency and specificity, detailing what Bush’s radical agenda means for America’s future — and for Canada’s, through its close and complex relationship with the United States. What We’ve Lost is the impassioned argument of a concerned citizen in response to the most precarious political crisis of our time.