Everybody should read Robert Scheer's new book, The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America. It's pretty much Rosebud's thinking on everything, from the soup of 9/11 to the country going nuts. This oozing pit of militarism we're slipping into just gets deeper and wider and darker. A "privileged" few in the defense and oil industries are getting exorbitantly wealthy, while the rest of us are losing our shirts. (And the environment is being destroyed; the U.S. Department of Defense is the biggest polluter on the planet.) But the real question is what is to be done? Whatever it is, it's up to us, and the need for action is urgent. We can start by getting rid of this post-9/11, mad neo-con misadventure in November...

From Publishers Weekly:
Veteran journalist Scheer (With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush, and Nuclear War) takes aim at America's defense policy and bloated military budget in this pugnacious and rigorously researched polemic. Tragedy can be opportunity, Scheer writes, and 9/11 provided the defense industry with the opportunity it had long been seeking. Unable to persuade the first Bush and Clinton administrations to invest in expensive, state-of-the-art weapons, the defense industry found fresh life as the current President Bush launched his war on terror and military expenditures swelled to the highest level in history. Scheer argues that war cannot defeat terrorism. What's required is simple police work—dogged, boring and not terribly expensive—not trillion-dollar bombers, submarines and nuclear arsenal—expenditures he contends are unrelated to defeating terrorists and of little use in Iraq. He soberly reminds readers that Americans have never objected to wasteful defense budgets, and antiwar elected officials fight as viciously as neoconservatives to bring money to their district's defense industries. Scheer's prose is as clear as his evidence; readers will be galvanized by his incendiary account. (June 9)

Review
"Robert Scheer is one of the best reporters of our time." (Joan Didion)