Mickey Herskowitz

Mickey Herskowitz

fired ex ghost writer of "A Charge to Keep" claims he has the goods on Bush. If he could prove these claims he would guarantee Bush's defeat. I'm afraid he is blowing smoke, because he has not presented proof.

Russ Baker via Brad at Shrillblog

According to Baker, Herskowitz claims that

1) Two years before the September 11 attacks, presidential candidate George W. Bush was already talking privately about the political benefits of attacking Iraq.

"He said to me: ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.’ And he said, ‘My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.’ He said, ‘If I have a chance to invade….if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.'”

2) that Bush expressed frustration at a lifetime as an underachiever in the shadow of an accomplished father. In aggressive military action, he saw the opportunity to emerge from his father’s shadow.

3) Bush told him that after transferring from his Texas Guard unit two-thirds through his six-year military obligation to work on an Alabama political campaign, he did not attend any Alabama National Guard drills at all, because he was “excused.”

4) "He [Bush] told me[Herskowitz] that as a leader, you can never admit to a mistakeThat was one of the keys to being a leader.”

5) In 2003, Bush’s father indicated to him that he disagreed with his son’s invasion of Iraq.

6) George W. Bush’s beliefs on Iraq were based in part on a notion dating back to the Reagan White House – ascribed in part to now-vice president Dick Cheney, Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee under Reagan. “Start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade.”

7) Bush’s circle of pre-election advisers had a fixation on the political capital that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher collected from the Falklands War."


The problem is that, while Baker has Herskowitz on tape, Herskowitz does not have Bush on tape. Baker says he said that "A campaign official arrived at his home at seven a.m. on a Monday morning and took his notes and computer files." I thought ghost writers usually tape record their converstions with "authors", Herskowitz doesn'teven mention a cassette (that's a molecular biology joke). There is no way of knowing if he has nailed the guy like Mickey Spillane, hit it out of the park like Mickey Mantle (another client) or made a fool of himself like another journalist named Mickey.

Unless unless he had a tape and kept it.