AMERICA: At the White House correspondents' dinner in Washington on Saturday, President George Bush quipped: "It really gets me when the critics say I haven't done enough for the economy - look what I've done for the book publishing industry!" Conor O'Clery writes
One of the consequences of running a water-tight administration is that insider stories in book form are in huge demand. Top of the best-seller list is Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack which relates infighting over Iraq inside the White House (but which Karl Rove has put on the Bush campaign website as recommended reading because he believes it shows the President as decisive and engaged). This is followed by Richard Clark's Against all Enemies which details White House counterterrorism failures before 9/11.
Not far behind is John Dean's Worse than Watergate, an indictment of the Bush administration by Nixon's counsel during Watergate.
Then there is Craig Unger's House of Bush, House of Saud which traces "the secret relationship between the world's two most powerful dynasties", and Kevin Phillips's American Dynasty which finds a "pattern of deceit" in the Bush family.
Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty about the disillusion of former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill is still selling well, as is Al Franken's satirical critique, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, a title which promoted Bush to tell the dinner: "To say I've read some of them - that would be a lie!"
So what is the President reading these days? On a tour of the Midwest this week he told reporters he was dipping into the writings of Oswald Chambers, a Scottish minister from the early 20th century whose teachings are still popular among Christians.
In an election year Mr Bush may have taken special note of what Chambers often told his friends - that after a period in obscurity, "then suddenly I shall flame out, do my work, and be gone."
The latest "must-read" tell-all book to add to the list is Joseph Wilson's The Politics of Truth, Inside the Lies that led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity.
Mr Wilson, a former US ambassador, went to Niger at the request of Vice-President Dick Cheney's office to investigate reports that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium. He reported that they were false. When Mr Bush repeated the claim in his State of the Union Message, Wilson spoke out, and, as the blurb states, "called a lie a lie".
In revenge White House officials leaked to right-wing newspaper columnist and TV pundit, Robert Novak, the classified information that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was an undercover CIA operative, thus ending her career. The Justice Department is currently investigating the leak, which is a possible criminal offence.
In the book Wilson fingers Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, as the man who attacked his integrity and reputation around town and "quite possibly" exposed his wife's identity.
His other suspect is Elliot Abrams, a National Security Council official who was pardoned by the first President Bush after committing perjury in the Iran-Contra scandal. Wilson reserves particular scorn for Robert Novak, who he says "soared to new heights of journalistic irresponsibility" as a purveyor of the right-wing party line "whether it's touting the truth or - as it too often is unfortunately - promoting the big lie."
David Brock, the former right-wing insider turned liberal who confessed all in his book Blinded by the Right, has created a website, mediamatters.org, specifically to hunt out and expose those who "promote the big lie" in the conservative media. With the help of $2 million from Democratic supporters Brock says he aims to stop "falsehoods masquerading as journalism" that "spread like a virus into professional media venues".
One of his main targets is Rupert Murdoch's top-rated Fox News Channel. In one instance this week, Brock reports that Fox's Bill O'Reilly told viewers: "Time now for the 'Most Ridiculous Item of the Day'. Al Gore has announced that he is starting up a new cable channel exclusively devoted to liberal stuff."
However, in his press conference earlier that day, when announcing his acquisition of Newsworld International from Vivendi Universal SA, Brock quotes the former vice-president actually saying: "This is not going to be a liberal network or a Democratic network or a political network in any way, shape or form."
Another of Brock's targets is Rush Limbaugh, the most popular and influential conservative talk show host in America. Limbaugh has his own take on the Iraqi prisoner abuse. "All right, so we're at war with these people," he told his millions of listeners. "And they're in a prison where they're being softened up for interrogation. And we hear that the most humiliating thing you can do is make one Arab male disrobe in front of another. Sounds to me like it's pretty thoughtful.
"Sounds to me in the context of war this is pretty good intimidation - and especially if you put a woman in front of them and then spread those pictures around the Arab world. And we're sitting here \, 'Oh, my God, they're gonna hate us! Oh no! What are they gonna think of us?'
"I think maybe the other perspective needs to be at least considered. Maybe they're gonna think we are serious. Maybe they're gonna think we mean it this time. Maybe they're gonna think we're not gonna kowtow to them.
"Maybe the people who ordered this are pretty smart. Maybe the people who executed this pulled off a brilliant manoeuvre. Nobody got hurt. Nobody got physically injured. But, boy, there was a lot of humiliation of people who are trying to kill us - in ways they hold dear. Sounds pretty effective to me if you look at us in the right context."
Limbaugh also has an explanation for the outrage across the United States at the pictures. "I think the reaction to the stupid torture is an example of the feminisation of this country," he said. The broadcaster isn't too happy that the President said he was sorry for the humiliation of prisoners.
"Guess who's laughing his ass off right now," he said. "Osama bin Laden. Mullah Omar, the one-eyed sheik, wherever the hell he is, and Yasser Arafat, these guys have all got to be laughing their asses off at Bush's apology."
The President's speech to the White House correspondents served as a warm-up for talkshow host Jay Leno, who told guests it was not true that when the President of Greece showed Mr Bush a picture of the ruins of the Acropolis, Mr Bush said: "We'll get the scum who did this."