Who's the boss? Forget neocons and theocons. It's the money-cons who really run Bush's Republican Party.

• Author: Drum, Kevin
• Position: The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked

The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked

by Crackpot Economics

by Jonathan Chait

Houghton Mifflin, 304 pp.

Missionary or mercenary? Put more plainly, what is George Bush at his core: a creature of the Christian right or a dutiful retainer of the millionaire's boys club? Jon Chait, a senior editor at the New Republic, takes on this question in The Big Con, but only to dismiss it almost immediately. George Bush, he says, is an avatar of the modern Republican Party, and Chait has little doubt what today's GOP really cares about:

American politics has been hijacked by a tiny coterie of right-wing economic extremists, some of them ideological zealots, others merely greedy, a few of them possibly insane ... The scope of their triumph is breathtaking. Over the course of the last three decades, they have moved from the right-wing fringe to the commanding heights of the national agenda. And the Christian right? They're being conned along with the rest of us: "Republican leaders have persistently declined to expend political capital on behalf of social conservative causes," Chait says. They pretend to care about abortion and gay marriage, but all you have to do is compare the amount of energy Bush expended on a proposed same-sex marriage ban (a few hours) to the energy he expended on privatizing Social Security (several months), and the party's real priorities become pretty clear.

So: mercenary it is. And this, I think, is what saves The Big Con from being just another dreary addition to the growing pile of books telling us what's wrong with George Bush and the modern Republican Party. There are at least ten or twenty entries in this sweepstakes already (mostly by liberals but with disillusioned conservatives working hard to catch up), and the bill of particulars gets pretty monotonous after you've read a handful of them.

So the honest truth is that if you've already read a few of these books (I've probably cracked open a dozen or so), or if you spend a lot of time in the blogosphere (it adds up to about sixty hours a week for me), you probably aren't going to learn very much new from The Big Con. But if you haven't, and you're only going to read one book in this genre, this is the one.

Before I explain why, I should probably lay my reviewing prejudices on the table. After six years of following the Bush administration with probably unhealthy intensity, I've come to a couple of conclusions. First, as much as the...