LOOKING INTO THE KRISTOL BALL :

Bush's Summer Reading List Hints at Iraq (Dana Milbank, August 20, 2002, washington Post)

Looking for signs about President Bush's thinking on an Iraq attack? Check out his vacation reading.

This vital intelligence comes from an interview with the industrious Associated Press reporter Scott Lindlaw, who went on a brush-clearing, pickup-riding, sweating-and-bleeding tour of the Bush ranch outside Waco last week. The president disclosed that he has been reading "Supreme Command," a new book by Eliot A. Cohen, a neoconservative hardliner on Iraq with the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

In his reading choice, Bush seems to be following the advice of Bill Kristol, the arch-neoconservative who has been using his Weekly Standard magazine to chide Bush for being too soft on Saddam Hussein. It is Kristol's blurb, after all, on the back cover of Cohen's book suggesting: "If I could ask President Bush to read one book, this would be it." Former Quayle man Kristol, suspected of playing puppeteer to a number of hawkish officials in the Bush Pentagon and National Security Council, appears to have added the marionette-in-chief to his act.

You can just see the headlines in France and the Middle East : Shadowy Jewish Svengali Controls Bush's Mind. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 20, 2002 6:42 PM