Kevin Phillips (born November 30, 1940) is an American writer and commentator, largely on politics, economics, and history. Formerly a Republican strategist, Phillips has become disaffected with his former party over the last two decades, and is now one of its harshest critics. He is a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times and National Public Radio, and is a political analyst on PBS' NOW with Bill Moyers. November 30 is the 334th day (335th in leap years) of the year in the Gregorian calendar, with 31 days remaining. ... 1940 (MCMXL) was a leap year starting on Monday (the link is to a full 1940 calendar). ... Politics is the process by which groups make decisions. ... Face-to-face trading interactions on the New York Stock Exchange trading floor. ... History studies the past in human terms. ... The Republican Party is one of two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. ... The Los Angeles Times (also known as the LA Times) is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California and distributed throughout the Western United States. ... Offical NPR logo National Public Radio (NPR) is an independent, private, non-profit membership organization of public radio stations in the United States. ... The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is a non-profit public broadcasting television service with 354 member TV stations in the United States, with some member stations available by cable in Canada. ... NOW is a PBS newsmagazine especially covering social and political issues. ...

Phillips was a senior strategist for Richard Nixon's 1968 campaign, which was the basis for a book, The Emerging Republican Majority, which predicted a conservative realignment in national politics, and is widely regarded as one of the most influential recent works in political science. His predictions regarding shifting voting patterns in presidential elections proved accurate, though they did not extend "down ballot" to Congress until the Republican revolution of 1994. Richard Milhous Nixon (January 9, 1913 – April 22, 1994) was the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. ... Presidential electoral votes by state. ... This article deals with conservatism as a political philosophy. ... Realigning election or realignment are terms from political history and political science describing a dramatic change in politics. ... The Politics series Politics Portal This box:      Political Science is the field concerning the theory and practice of politics and the description and analysis of political systems and political behaviour. ... The Republican Revolution refers to the success of Republican Party in the 1994 U.S. midterm elections, which resulted in a net gain of 54 seats in the House of Representatives, and a pickup of eight seats in the Senate. ...

Philips also was partly responsible for the design of the Southern strategy. In American politics, the Southern strategy refers to the focus of the Republican party on winning U.S. Presidential elections by securing the electoral votes of the U.S. Southern states. ...

The author of twelve books, he lives in Litchfield County, Connecticut. Litchfield County is located in the northwestern corner of the U.S. state of Connecticut. ...

Early Years

Phillips was educated at the Bronx High School of Science, Colgate University, the University of Edinburgh and Harvard Law School. After his stint as a senior strategist for the Nixon campaign, he served a year, starting in 1969, as Special Assistant to the U.S. Attorney General, but left after a year to become a columnist. In 1971, he became president of the American Political Research Corporation and editor-publisher of the American Political Report (through 1998). The Bronx High School of Science, commonly called Bronx Science, or just Science, is a specialized New York City public high school located in the Bedford Park section of the Bronx, with no tuition charges and admission by exam. ... Colgate in fall. ... The University of Edinburgh, founded in 1582,[4] is a renowned centre for teaching and research in Edinburgh, Scotland. ... Harvard Law School, often referred to in shorthand as Harvard Law or HLS, is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. ... The United States Attorney General is the head of the United States Department of Justice concerned with legal affairs and is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States government. ...

In 1982, the Wall Street Journal described him as “the leading conservative electoral analyst -- the man who invented the Sun Belt, named the New Right, and prophesied ‘The Emerging Republican Majority’ in 1969.” The Wall Street Journal is an influential international daily newspaper published in New York City, New York with an average daily circulation of 1,800,607 (2002). ...

Ironically for someone who in later life became a virulent critic of Republicans from the south and west, Phillips in his 1969 book identified the "Heartland" as the future core of Republican votes, and the "Yankee Northeast" as the future Democratic stronghold, foreshadowing the current split between Red States and Blue States. More than 30 years before the 2004 election, Phillips foresaw such previously Democratic states as Texas and West Virginia swinging to the Republicans while Vermont and Maine would become Democratic states. The rise of such partisan leaders as Howard Dean; John Kerry and Ned Lamont for the Democrats and religious conservatives in the Republican ranks would have come as no surprise. ... ... Howard Dean III (born November 17, 1948) is an American politician and physician from the U.S. state of Vermont. ... Al Gore (born December 11, 1943) is a Vietnam Veteran and the junior United States Senator from Massachusetts. ... Edward Miner Lamont, Jr. ...

His books

American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush 2004

Amazon.com writes:

In American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush, Phillips traces the rise of the Bush family from investment banking elites to political power brokers, using their Ivy League network, vast wealth, and questionable political maneuvering to obtain the White House and consequently, shake the foundation of constitutional American democracy. Citing the Bush family mainstays of finance, energy (oil), the military industrial complex, and national security and intelligence (the CIA), Phillips uses copious examples to show the dangerous alliance between the Bushes' business interests (huge corporations such as Enron and Haliburton) and the formation of national policy. No other family, Phillips says, that has fulfilled its presidential aspirations has been so involved in the ascendancy of the arms industry and of the 21st-century American imperium--often at the expense of regional and world peace and for their personal gain. // For other uses, see Dynasty (disambiguation). ... The Ancient Greek term aristocracy originally meant a system of government with rule by the best. The word is derived from two words, aristos meaning the best and kratein to rule. Aristocracies have most often been hereditary plutocracies (see below), where a sense of historical gravitas and noblesse oblige demands... The Bush family:President George W. Bush, First Lady Laura Bush, former First Lady Barbara Bush, and former President George H. W. Bush sit surrounded by family in the Red Room (White House) on January 6, 2005, together to celebrate the senior couples 60th wedding anniversary. ... Investment banks help companies and governments and their agencies to raise money by issuing and selling securities in the primary market. ... For the record label, see Ivy League Records. ...

From Salon.com (By Permission) Screenshot of Salon. ...

"American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush"

by Kevin Phillips

The Bush Dynasty's Dark Magic

A Review by Joan Walsh

People like Kevin Phillips aren't supposed to exist anymore. In a country that's become "two nations," this time not black and white but Red and Blue, conservatives rarely engage with liberals (unless it's to lampoon or attack them), let alone read their publications, reckon with their arguments, or -- perish the thought! -- even agree with them. But here comes Phillips, the renowned Nixon White House strategist who wrote "The Emerging Republican Majority" in 1969, a Nixon/Reagan/John McCain kind of Republican, with the most damning book to date about the Bush administrations (yes, that's plural), American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush.

Sure, we've had great Bush-bashing tomes in the last year: Joe Conason's Big Lies, Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, David Corn's The Lies of George W. Bush (Phillips is old school; he prefers "deceit" to "lies"); Bushwhacked from Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose. Most have surged onto bestseller lists, thanks to the unquenchable Blue-state thirst for the truth about Bush misdeeds. Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty: The Education of Paul O'Neill is in a class by itself, the first tell-all from a member of the famously loyal and tight-lipped Bush administration. And while it bolsters the Bush critics' case against the president -- showing his indifference to policy, his slavish devotion to politics and his determination to do the bidding of the superrich -- its reach is by necessity narrowed, given the focus on the former secretary of the treasury.

Phillips, by contrast, has written a dark, sprawling, provocative, sometimes almost paranoid book -- which is not to say that its most troubling conjectures can't be true. He assembles a wide array of evidence to show how, over four generations, the Walker-Bush clan has been on the front line of the rise of the military-industrial-intelligence complex, the ever-growing national security state that its fourth-generation heir just happens to run today, like his father before him. Various Walkers and Bushes have popped up, like patrician Forrest Gumps, in hot spots all over the globe in the last century -- pre- and post-revolution Russia, pre- and post-Hitler Germany, in Cuba before and during the Castro regime, and of course everywhere in the Middle East. (The Bush family has been loosely involved with Iraq, Phillips shows, since George Walker joined Averell Harriman's efforts to rebuild the Baku oil fields in the Soviet Caucasus, a few hundred miles north of Iraq, against the wishes of the U.S. government.)

All these international men of finance, with heavy interests in the energy industry, occasionally clashed with American officials over the years -- by doing business with the early Soviet Union, or rearming Germany in the 1930s (some say into the '40s) or, if you include Dick Cheney in the family (and Phillips practically does, with good reason), lobbying against U.S. sanctions on Iraq from the corporate headquarters of Halliburton. But mostly they do their patriotic duty when asked to, duty that has sometimes included spying and other kinds of shadowy dealings with foreign nations. George H. Walker and his son-in-law Prescott Bush (great-grandfather and grandfather of the current president, respectively) can be tied to an amazing roster of Cold War national security potentates, including CIA director Allen Dulles and his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Defense Secretaries Robert Lovett and James Forrestal, and National Security Advisor Averell Harriman. Phillips calls Prescott Bush a "national security gray eminence," and speculates, on inconclusive evidence, that the Connecticut senator may well have been a CIA asset, "perhaps even a shadow CIA director"; his son George H.W. Bush, of course, wound up as CIA director under Nixon. If the connections sometimes seem sinister, they also make sense, given the way the free flow of capital and natural resources, especially oil, would come to be equated with national security in the middle of the last century.

What's sinister to Phillips is the way the Bush family, using that vast network of business, intelligence and government connections, managed to elect not just one president against all political odds (George H.W. Bush lost two Texas Senate races, only to be saved by Nixon with appointments as ambassador to China and then CIA director) but an incredible two. Given the size of the first Bush loss to Bill Clinton in 1992, as well as the mediocrity of the son who aspired to succeed him, Phillips finds it astonishing that the family was able to use its vast web of shadowy and sunshiny connections again to "restore" the Bush dynasty in the White House -- "a turn that would have surprised and presumably appalled the founding fathers," he writes.

Now, a surprised and appalled Phillips observes, we have a second George Bush running the country and advancing his family's perverse agenda: serving the rich domestically, increasing the dominance of the energy industry, enlarging the security state, and pursuing a bumbling foreign policy that's clearly made the world less safe, from Afghanistan to Iraq to the Middle East.

Phillips is at his best showing how the sins of the first George Bush continue to plague the U.S., which must now suffer the sins of the son. Clearly we're still living with the consequences of so many Reagan-Bush foreign policy bungles today: backing the mujahedin in Afghanistan against the Soviets, which gave rise to the al-Qaida-sheltering Taliban; arming Saddam to fight Iran during the Iran-Iraq war; playing games with Iran, too, first through the 1980 "October surprise" (there's strong evidence that Bush, along with Reagan campaign manager Bill Casey, another spymaster, played a role in reaching out to Iran's leaders to prevent a pre-election release of the U.S. hostages that might have helped Jimmy Carter), then with the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal at the end of Reagan's term. He also traces the political, personal and financial ties between the Bush family and the House of Saud, which has driven a foreign policy that's coddled the Saudis, who have, arguably, in turn coddled al-Qaida.

Then there was the first Gulf War, launched after Bush signaled to his former ally Saddam that invading Kuwait wouldn't trigger U.S. military action, then changed his mind, then ended the war without toppling Saddam, then encouraged the Kurds and Shiites to revolt, then abandoned them to Saddam's vengeance, finally leaving Iraq a cesspool of weapons and tyranny and suffering for the Clinton administration to deal with. You can see in today's headlines the legacy of all those bad decisions, which are costing Americans and Iraqis and Afghans their lives every day. The notion of "blowback" from disastrous American foreign-policy adventures has been a staple of lefty debate for years, but the conservative Phillips sees blowback from Bush mistakes everywhere, and documents it throughout the book.

How do the Bushes evade a public backlash against these foreign policy disasters? Phillips' most disturbing chapter may be the one on the religious right's rise to power, to which George W. Bush owes his presidency. He learned from his father's 1992 defeat, which many blamed on his failure to court the culture warriors and evangelicals who never trusted the Eastern elitist, formerly pro-choice president. He was his father's liaison to the Christian right in both the 1988 and '92 campaigns, and it paid off for him in 2000. Although he only got 48 percent of the vote overall, Bush drew a staggering 84 percent of Christian evangelicals -- only 75 percent of them went for Ronald Reagan -- and they form the backbone of his base. Phillips details how, even as Americans overall have gradually become less religious, power and numbers have shifted from mainline Christian churches -- Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians and so on -- to more conservative, fundamentalist sectors. Where the mainline Protestant groups, when getting involved in social issues, tended to take on the plight of the poor, the fundamentalists are more concerned about abortion, gay rights, school prayer and individual salvation through Jesus Christ.

American Dynasty makes you realize, if you hadn't already, why Bush is the ideal Christian-right president. He fits the Fundamentalist Project's criteria for the type of person who's attracted to this rigid brand of Christianity: He was a rootless (albeit wealthy) ne'er-do-well who couldn't quite find his way in business, fought a drinking problem and then turned his life around, with the help of Billy Graham, when he adopted a fundamentalist approach to Christianity. He was almost literally saved by Jesus, and where fundamentalists and Southerners never trusted his father, they embrace George W. as one of them. He repays them with coded biblical imagery in his speeches, from his constant references to "evil" to his public reliance on the power of prayer, plus a Middle East policy that seems tailor-made to Christian right "end times" dogma.

Both Christian fundamentalists and ultra-Zionists believe Israel is meant to inhabit the biblical lands of Judea and Samaria -- the Christians because that will supposedly trigger Armageddon, the battle between Christ and the Antichrist. Phillips gets up to his elbows in creepy "end times" activism -- Christian Southerners funding Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories, Texas cattlemen breeding the mythic "red heifer," whose appearance is supposed to signal Israelis to rebuild the old temple in Jerusalem and usher in Armageddon. He also cites polls showing that fully 45 percent of American Christians see the world ending with an apocalyptic battle. You start to wonder if somehow Bush really was destined to play this role -- and if there's a safe place anywhere on earth to sit out the cataclysm that, between his religion and his foreign policy, he seems capable of provoking.

Occasionally Phillips slides partway down the slippery slope of conspiracy theory. He wades into the most sordid -- and mostly unproven -- allegations against the Bush dynasty: that Prescott Bush actively propped up Hitler through his businesses, even during the war; that Yale's secret Skull and Bones society was central to the Bay of Pigs scandal, and that George H.W. Bush was a CIA asset working with anti-Castro Cubans back then; that in 1980, he personally flew to Paris to lobby Iranian leaders and make sure the American hostages weren't returned before the November election; that a young George W. Bush was arrested on cocaine charges and his father had his record expunged, and that he went AWOL during his National Guard service. He throws water on some but not all of those theories, but lets most stand as possibilities. (It's true that Prescott Bush owned a small interest in a New York bank that helped finance the Nazis, and which was seized by the U.S. government in 1942. Other allegations of Nazi links remain unsubstantiated.)

He quotes, respectfully, the best-known conspiracy theorists on each issue: Ron Rosenbaum on Skull and Bones, Robert Parry on Bush's personal involvement in the October surprise, and, far more dubiously, the late J.H. Hatfield, author of Fortunate Son, which peddled the notion that Bush was busted for cocaine in the 1970s but his father got his record expunged. Rosenbaum and Parry might be wrong, but their work is respected; Hatfield's allegations (looked into by Salon, among other publications) probably shouldn't be quoted in a serious book except to debunk them.

But Phillips' retelling of how Bush won the presidency in 2000 is exhaustive, authoritative and disturbing. In some ways it's oddly soothing, in this politically polarized terrain, to see a once-loyal Republican (Phillips has registered as an Independent in reaction to the Bush takeover of the GOP) assemble the evidence that's mostly been confined to liberal magazines and Web logs that Bush wrongly seized the presidency by playing aggressive politics during the Florida recount, and finally, by appealing to his father's friends on the Supreme Court. Phillips goes everywhere -- the bourgeois riot in Miami, when thuggish conservatives stopped that county's recount; elderly Jews who supposedly voted for Pat Buchanan in Palm Beach, thanks to the butterfly ballot; irregularities in Broward and Volusia counties -- and shows how Gore essentially lost when he didn't demand a statewide recount that would also have looked at the issue of "overvotes," ballots where more than one candidate was inadvertently selected, but the voter's intended choice was clear. (And he rails against the media outlets that sponsored their own recount for choosing to mute their findings -- which were that, using every conceivable recount standard, Gore won Florida -- in an outburst of patriotic restraint after 9/11.)

It's the scandal of Florida that gives credibility to Phillips' sometimes paranoid-seeming claims that the Bushes are a "dynasty." Of course, it's not a literal dynasty: President Bush did not inherit the office from his father. But when I pointed that out to Phillips, trying to argue that, like him or not, Bush had "obviously" been elected, the author laughed. "Obviously? I'm not so sure about that." And he had me. Bush's lingering lack of legitimacy, post-Florida, is part of what has polarized the nation, encouraging the paranoid to weave conspiracy theories about a shadow government -- and even sober liberals to wonder if it's possible to defeat the potent combination of money, fear and religious fervor the Bushes have marshaled, especially post-9/11, to continue their control of the White House.

Given how much ink has been spilled lately about "Bush hate," which supposedly afflicts only crazy lefties and their Democratic Party panderers like Screamin' Howard Dean and the reinvented Angry Al Gore, it's fascinating to see a conservative who despises Bush. Phillips admits his dislike for both George Bushes in the book, and in a mostly respectful New York Times review, Michael Oreskes suggested the author should have revealed the personal basis for that dislike. Phillips insists there isn't one, and I believe him. Of course the GOP strategist who preached a conservative populism, a rejection of both Democratic and Republican elites, would be appalled by the rise of Bush Republicanism, a winner-take-all social Darwinism imposed by a mediocre family that rigged the rules of the game to benefit itself. You can tell Phillips particularly loathed the first President Bush, with his Ivy League affect and his pork-rind pretenses; but he's not much higher on the allegedly more down-to-earth son, refusing even to grant the authenticity of his roots: Midland, Texas, as Phillips notes, was overtaken by Easterners during the oil boom of the 1950s and '60s, and its streets were named after Ivy League schools.

Phillips believes that a Democrat who can channel populist disgust at the corrupt, patrician Bushes has a chance of toppling George W. Bush this year. And while his chapter on the power of the Christian right is alarming, it also contains what Phillips says are the seeds of hope for Democrats. Because just as he thinks Democrats bungled the '60s by embracing the counterculture without reassuring the anxious white ethnics who were their base, Phillips now believes the Republicans are bungling by embracing Christian right extremists who are going to lose the culture wars for the GOP.

American Dynasty made it to No. 5 on the New York Times bestseller list last weekend, which can't be good news for the Bush campaign. On the other hand, I find myself wondering if the book is being bought and read by conservatives, or only by Bush-weary Democrats. It's well known that the country's Red vs. Blue polarization is reflected on bestseller lists, where Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly shriek at Al Franken and Michael Moore, but almost nobody reads from both sides of the aisle. Here's hoping some Republicans do reach past Coulter's invective and pick up Phillips' passionate call to arms. If they'd take their party back, we'd be closer to getting our country back. Howard Dean, less angry, might get his voice back, and the Bushes might have to settle for being wealthy folk who just can't win a national election, no matter how much they try to rig the rules.

American Theocracy (2006)

In American Theocracy Phillips has come full circle, becoming a very harsh critic of the Republican Party. PBS journalist Allen Dwight Callahan^[1] describes the GOP "Politics Of Radical Religion, Oil, And Borrowed Money In The 21st Century" the book's subtitle and theme, as an "Unholy Alliance."^[2] Phillips' last chapter, in a nod to his first major work, is called "The Erring Republican Majority." In the book, he "presents a nightmarish vision of ideological extremism, catastrophic fiscal irresponsibility, rampant greed and dangerous shortsightedness." American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (ISBN 0-670-03486-X) is the latest work of political commentary by American political writer Kevin Phillips. ... The Republican Party is one of two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. ... Not to be confused with Public Broadcasting Services in Malta. ... This does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... This article is about the modern United States Republican Party. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Supermajor, Oil major and Seven Sisters (oil companies) (Discuss) Big Oil is a term used to describe the individual and collective economic power of the largest oil and gasoline manufacturers, and their perceived influence on politics, particularly in... This article is being considered for deletion in accordance with Wikipedias deletion policy. ...

The New York Times writes:

He identifies three broad and related trends — none of them new to the Bush years but all of them, he believes, exacerbated by this administration's policies — that together threaten the future of the United States and the world. One is the role of oil in defining and, as Phillips sees it, distorting American foreign and domestic policy. The second is the ominous intrusion of radical Christianity into politics and government. And the third is the astonishing levels of debt — current and prospective — that both the government and the American people have been heedlessly accumulating. If there is a single, if implicit, theme running through the three linked essays that form this book, it is the failure of leaders to look beyond their own and the country's immediate ambitions and desires so as to plan prudently for a darkening future.^[3]

Phillips uses the term “financialization” to describe how the U.S. economy has been radically restructured from a focus on production, manufacturing and wages, to a focus on speculation, debt, and profits. Since the 1980s, Phillips argues in American Theocracy,

the underlying Washington strategy… was less to give ordinary Americans direct sums than to create a low-interest-rate boom in real estate, thereby raising the percentage of American home ownership, ballooning the prices of homes, and allowing householders to take out some of that increase through low-cost refinancing. This triple play created new wealth to take the place of that destroyed in the 2000-2002 stock-market crash and simultaneously raised consumer confidence.

Nothing similar had ever been engineered before. Instead of a recovery orchestrated by Congress and the White House and aimed at the middle- and bottom-income segments, this one was directed by an appointed central banker, a man whose principal responsibility was to the banking system. His relief, targeted on financial assets and real estate, was principally achieved by monetary stimulus. This in itself confirmed the massive realignment of preferences and priorities within the American system….

Likewise huge and indisputable but almost never discussed were the powerful political economics lurking behind the stimulus: the massive rate-cut-driven post-2000 bailout of the FIRE sector, with its ever-climbing share of GDP and proximity to power. No longer would Washington concentrate stimulus on wages or public-works employment. The Fed's policies, however shrewd, were not rooted in an abstraction of the national interest but in pursuit of its statutory mandate to protect the U.S. banking and payments system, now inseparable from the broadly defined financial-services sector.

Brown University is a private university located in Providence, Rhode Island. ...

Criticism

American Theocracy received a variety of reviews. Joseph Loconte, of the Religion and a Free Society at the conservative thinktank the Heritage Foundation labeled it a work of "irrational, fantastical, near-nativist charges.[1]" The Heritage Foundation is a conservative public policy research institute based in Washington, D.C., in the United States. ...

Book list

• American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (2006) ISBN 0-670-03486-X
• American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush (2004) ISBN 0-670-03264-6
• William McKinley (2003)
• Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (2002) ISBN 0-7679-0533-4
• The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics and the Triumph of Anglo-America (1999)
• Arrogant Capital: Washington, Wall Street and the Frustration of American Politics (1994)
• Boiling Point: Democrats, Republicans and the Decline of Middle Class Prosperity (1993)
• The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath (1990)
• Staying on Top: The Business Case for a National Industrial Strategy (1984)
• Post-Conservative America (1982)
• Mediacracy: American Parties and Politics in the Communications Age (1974)
• The Emerging Republican Majority (1969)

American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (ISBN 0-670-03486-X) is the latest work of political commentary by American political writer Kevin Phillips. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Supermajor, Oil major and Seven Sisters (oil companies) (Discuss) Big Oil is a term used to describe the individual and collective economic power of the largest oil and gasoline manufacturers, and their perceived influence on politics, particularly in... // For other uses, see Dynasty (disambiguation). ... The Ancient Greek term aristocracy originally meant a system of government with rule by the best. The word is derived from two words, aristos meaning the best and kratein to rule. Aristocracies have most often been hereditary plutocracies (see below), where a sense of historical gravitas and noblesse oblige demands... The Bush family:President George W. Bush, First Lady Laura Bush, former First Lady Barbara Bush, and former President George H. W. Bush sit surrounded by family in the Red Room (White House) on January 6, 2005, together to celebrate the senior couples 60th wedding anniversary. ...

Quote

Now what I get a sense of from all of this -- and then topped obviously by spending all the money in 2000 to basically buy the election -- is that this is not a family that has a particularly strong commitment to American democracy. Its sense of how to win elections comes out of a CIA manual, not out of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution." The CIA Seal The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is an American intelligence agency, responsible for obtaining and analyzing information about foreign governments, corporations, and individuals, and reporting such information to the various branches of the U.S. Government. ... A copy of the 1823 William J. Stone reproduction of the Declaration of Independence The Declaration of Independence was an act of the Second Continental Congress, adopted on July 4, 1776, which declared that the Thirteen Colonies were independent of the Kingdom of Great Britain. ...

-- Kevin Phillips writing about the Bush family in American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush The Bush family:President George W. Bush, First Lady Laura Bush, former First Lady Barbara Bush, and former President George H. W. Bush sit surrounded by family in the Red Room (White House) on January 6, 2005, together to celebrate the senior couples 60th wedding anniversary. ...

See also

• October surprise conspiracy

The October Surprise Conspiracy was an alleged plot that claimed representatives of the 1980 Ronald Reagan presidential campaign had conspired with Islamic Republic of Iran to delay the release of 66 Americans held hostage in Tehran until after the 1980 U.S. Presidential election. ...

External links

• Bio page at the American Theocracy site
• Fmr. Top Republican Strategist Discusses The Bush Family's Rise To Power Since WWI
• Fmr. Top Republican Strategist Examines the History of the Bush Family
• Fmr. GOP Strategist Kevin Phillips on American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century
• New York Times Book review of American Theocracy
• The Erring Republican Authority: Kevin Phillips is wrong about everything. Why is he taken so seriously?