From the workplace to the war zone, the Bush administration has wrapped female-friendly rhetoric around some of the most hard-core policy since Ronald Reagan. Some well-placed women have helped to pull off that con job. Invaluable to the president, underscrutinized in the press, the Bushwomen—the women appointed to the inner circle of the president’s cabinet and sub-cabinet—are cast in the public mind as moderate, malleable, maverick, irrelevant or benign. Their carefully crafted images tap into stereotypes, while the reality of their records has remained out of sight...until now. This is the first book to investigate Bush’s women, and to report on how they rose to power and what they’ve done. Find out about why Chevron named a tanker after National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice; how financial ties to big tobacco corporations got Secretary of the Interior Gale Ann Norton dubbed ‘The Woman from Marlboro Country’; how Labor Secretary Elaine Chao bullied union longshoreworkers to benefit her trading-with-China family and friends; read excerpts of Lynne Cheney’s lesbian novel; and discover how Karen Hughes got her first job thanks to the National Organization for Women. Women swing voters can decide elections now, and the Bush team will do whatever it takes to win their support. The cynical crusade to put a female face on anti-feminist policy is revealed in this scathing and entertaining investigation of the sinister politicians we call the Bushwomen.
Author
Laura Flanders is a British-born US-based journalist who presents the current events show GRITtv, broadcast weekdays on Link and Free Speech TV. She has written for The Nation, In These Times, The Progressive and Ms. Magazine, and has contributed op-ed pieces to the San Francisco Chronicle. Flanders hosted the weekday radio show Your Call on KALW, before starting the Saturday/Sunday evening Laura Flanders Show on Air America Radio in 2004. It became the weekly one-hour Radio Nation in 2007. She was founding director of the women's desk at the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), and for a decade produced and hosted CounterSpin, FAIR's syndicated radio program. Flanders has published four books: Blue Grit: True Democrats Take Back Politics from the Politicians (2007); Bushwomen: Tales of a Cynical Species (2004), a study of the women in George W. Bush's cabinet; and a collection of essays, Real Majority, Media Minority: The Cost of Sidelining Women in Reporting (1997). She edited The W Effect: Sexual Politics in the Age of Bush (2004). Her TV appearances include Lou Dobbs Tonight, The O'Reilly Factor, Hannity and Colmes, Washington Journal, Donahue, Good Morning America, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, The Ed Show, Real Time with Bill Maher, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation TV news discussion program counterSpin (not to be confused with the FAIR show of the same name). Flanders has described herself as a "liberal, lefty person." She is the daughter of the British comic songwriter and broadcaster Michael Flanders and his wife Claudia Cockburn. The brothers Alexander, Andrew and Patrick Cockburn all journalists, are her uncles. Her sister is Stephanie Flanders, a BBC journalist.
