Current Affairs: Those who detest George W. Bush and believe that his presidency is a disaster for the United States and for the rest of the world will be further confirmed in their view by these two books, writes Joe Carroll.
For journalists James Moore and Wayne Slater, Bush would not be where he is today without the political skills of his long-term adviser, Karl Rove.
But one should not forget that Bush did get a degree in Yale and an MBA from Harvard. Rove never graduated, mainly because he was too busy working for politicians.
The TV political satire, Spitting Image, liked to mock Ronald Reagan in a sketch entitled 'The President's Brain is Missing', and there was much fun in the hunt for the peanut-sized brain.
This was before the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Empire collapsed. Had this teeny brain had any role in this? Were the millions of Americans who voted for Reagan all morons of some kind? Europeans like to scoff at the perceived intellectual deficiencies of American presidents, but who are we to scoff? Foreign affairs are not George W. Bush's strong point, as the gaffes during his election campaign about "Grecians" and not knowing the name of the president of Pakistan revealed. But describing Karl Rove as "Bush's brain" is stretching it.
Rove played a significant role in the election of Bush as governor of Texas in 1994 and in opening up the way to the White House in 2000, but an adviser, at the end of the day, is just an adviser. The buck did stop with Bush.
Bush despised what he saw as the method of his predecessor, Bill Clinton, of poring over polls and the analysis of focus groups before making decisions. As the authors put it: "Bush understood Rove's genius in analysing the politics of a situation - he needed it - but he insisted that arguments be made on the basis of merit and not the grubby Clintonian business of sticking a finger into the wind to measure public opinion."
Certainly, the decision to go ahead with the invasion of Iraq without UN Security Council approval was not poll-driven. On the other hand, Moore and Slater show that Rove was urging war on Saddam as a perfect issue for Bush and the Republicans to fight the mid-term elections last November.
Bush had laid the ground in a speech to the West Point military academy the previous June which, with hindsight, was not sufficiently noticed.
"I will not stand by as peril grows closer and closer. If we wait for threats to fully materialise, we will have waited too long," he told the graduates.
As an electoral tactic, the promise of war on Saddam paid off. For the first time in decades, Republicans emerged from a mid-term election with control of both houses of Congress as well as the White House.
For political writer Michael Lind there is a more sinister aspect to Bush's electoral success and his plunge into war. The villain here is Texas politics and the reactionary, conservative and fundamentalist brand, now in the ascendant, that is leading the US down dangerous paths and the world with it.
Lind, who is Texan himself, argues that the Lone Star state is divided between "traditionalists" and "modernists", the former symbolised by oil companies, ranches and farms, the latter symbolised by the Johnson Space Centre outside Houston and the computer industry that has grown up in Austin's "Silicon Hills".
Bush, like his father, is part of the southern oligarchy that grew rich originally on cotton plantations worked by slaves, and more recently on oil and cattle. Bush junior has, Lind writes, "used the power of the presidency to promote the economic and foreign policy agenda of the Southern far right: a massive tax cut as the centrepiece of domestic policy, and, in foreign policy, Protestant fundamentalist-inspired support for the Likud Party of Israel, combined with consideration of schemes for an American takeover of the Iraqi and Saudi oilfields".
As Lind sees it, the White House and the Republican Party are now dominated by the most reactionary and fundamentalist brand of southern politics, largely emanating from Texas. Political control of the state, which for more than 100 years was in the hands of racist Democrats, has now passed to the Republicans, many of whom are former Democrats who could not stomach the civil rights policies of their own Lyndon Johnson. Rove, incidentally, is responsible for much of this shift to the Republicans over the past two decades, according to Moore and Slater.
At national level, the ideological thrust for this conservative takeover has been provided by the "neo-cons", former Democrat leftist intellectuals, some of them Jewish, who reacted to flower power and the liberalism of Johnson's Great Society in the 1960s by supporting Reagan and the Likud.
For Lind, George W. Bush is a willing instrument of ideologues of superior intellect and of Texas plutocrats to whom he feels he belongs in spite of his East Coast origins. Lind argues that Texas is more racist Deep South than cowboy Wild West, especially the powerful east Texas. The intolerance of minorities, black and brown, shown by the descendants of the plantation owners he ascribes to their often Ulster-Scots ancestry and tradition of keeping Ulster Catholics in subjection.
He can get carried away by his theories. Another one is that Bush's pro-Israeli policy derives, although he does not know it, from the teaching of a 19th- century Church of Ireland clergyman, John Nelson Darby, who founded a sect called the Brethren. Darby prophesied that Israel would be recreated as a nation-state, which it has been, and that it would survive various attempts to destroy it until an Armageddon led by the anti-Christ. Christian fundamentalists, it seems, feel bound to support Israel until this apocalyptic end-time.
Bush's religion has been an important part of his life since his "born again" experience following a meeting with Rev Billy Graham, but this does not mean he should be identified with Christian fundamentalism in its cruder versions, including the rejection of evolution. He was reared as an Episcopalian and is now a Methodist like his wife, Laura.
Bill Clinton is a Southern Baptist, but this did not make him a fundamentalist-style Christian as that is understood in the South.
Joe Carroll is a former Washington Correspondent of The Irish Times
Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential. By James Moore and Wayne Slater, Wiley, 305pp, £18.50
Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American
Politics. By Michael Lind, Basic Books, 201pp, $24