Dec 30th 2003 - From The Economist print edition Litany of books lay into the leader of the free world

Dude, Where's My Country? By Michael Moore Warner Books; 272 pages; $24.95 Penguin/Allen Lane; £17.99

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right

By Al Franken

Penguin/Dutton; 400 pages; $24.95 Penguin/Allen Lane; £12

Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush's America By Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose

Random House 347 pages; $24.95 Allison & Busby; £7.99

The Bush-Hater's Handbook A Guide to the Most Appalling Presidency of the Past 100 Years By Jack Huberman Nation Books; 337 pages; $13.95

American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush By Kevin Phillips Viking; 384 pages; $25.95

Buy all at: www.Amazon.com

"NO ONE likes us. We don't care." Thus goes the chant of Millwall, an unloved-and-proud-of-it British football club. It could also be the anthem of the current White House. Not since Richard Nixon has an administration rejoiced so much in being loathed by its opponents. The Clintons used to fret about "a vast right-wing conspiracy". George Bush's attitude, whether the foe is Gerhard Schröder or the one American in five who is happy to be called liberal, is a smirk and a curt "Don't mess with Texas."

The fact that a president who promised to bring a new tone to Washington has actually polarised his country may prove a sensible electoral gamble on his part: the Bush lovers probably narrowly outnumber the Bush haters. But it is playing blue murder with political books.

Overt hatred was once rather unseemly in the literary world. Now it sells books by the shelf-load. Heading into Christmas, the first three books on the New York Times bestseller list were "Dude, Where's My Country?" by Michael Moore, the clown prince of Bushophobia, "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them", a leftish rant by Al Franken, and then an angry conservative rejoinder, "Who's Looking Out For You?" by Bill O' Reilly of Fox News. Just below them sits another hefty seller-"Bushwhacked" by two Texan detractors, Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose.

The Bush bashers are quick to point out that the conservatives began this fight-by unleashing a succession of jeremiads against the Clintons, accusing the first couple of everything from murder to overseeing "The Death of Outrage", to use the title of William Bennett's bestseller. Since Mr Clinton left the White House, the right has found new enemies from "the left-wing media" to faint-hearted Europeans. Producing a snarling "liberals-eat-your-children" book seems to be part of the job description for Fox News presenters.

Yet Bush hatred arguably now exceeds even Clinton hatred in its scope. It has become a genre with endless sub-genres: for instance if you want to pursue Mr Franken's interest in fibs, you can go to "Big Lies" by Joe Conason or "The Lies of George W. Bush" by David Corn.

More important, Bush hatred is multinational. Clintophobia largely stopped at America's borders. But Bush loathing has picked up a strong anti-American tailwind, one that the loathers are not unafraid to exploit. The cover for the American edition of Paul Krugman's collection of anti-Bush essays, "The Great Unravelling", is fairly restrained; the British cover is a grotesque lobotomised image of the president and vice-president which would horrify readers of Mr Krugman's column in the New York Times.

As a commercial phenomenon, Bush hatred is rather interesting. But sooner or later, you have to look at the content-and this is depressing, particularly if you read more than one book. Most of the anti-Bush books are fairly lazy affairs, endlessly repeating the same old stories. Just as you could feel Whitewater looming a few pages away in a Clintophobe book, you know when the Bush baiters are about to mention Arbusto-Mr Bush's first failed oil company-and what they will say.

There are bright spots. "Bushwhacked", the pick of the bunch, has some original research and is written with the same biting Texan twang that Governor Ann Richards used to great effect against George Bush senior. Mr Franken is often genuinely funny: for instance, he writes to conservative advocates of abstinence education, asking them to send stories of their own heroism in this regard for an inspirational book for young people called "Savin' It!" ("Don't be afraid", he urges the likes of Mr Bush and John Ashcroft, "to share a moment when you were tempted to have sex, but were able to overcome your urges through willpower and strength of character.") By contrast, Mr Moore's satiric skills seem to have decreased in direct proportion to his fame: the wit of "Roger & Me", which skewered General Motors, has given way to "Woo Hoo! I Got Me a Tax Cut!"

However, the real problem with the Bush-hating books is their lack of proportion. "Bushwhacked" nails Mr Bush's oil career as an open-and-shut case of crony capitalism, but then adopts the same tone of outrage with Mr Bush's generally well-meaning education bill. "The Bush Hater's Handbook", assembled by a Canadian who changed nationality to vote against the president, compares Mr Bush's "compassionate conservatism" slogan with "Arbeit macht frei" from Auschwitz, though it concludes they are "not on a par".

How sad then to include in all this "American Dynasty". Sad, because the author, Kevin Phillips, has a good record as a political pundit, stretching back to "The Emerging Republican Majority" in 1969; sad, too, because he has amassed a lot of material on Mr Bush's forebears-a great grandfather who was a war-profiteering robber baron, a grandfather with links to both Nazi Germany and the early CIA, a father who exaggerated the extent to which he struck out for oil in Texas by himself.

Written as a narrative, this could have made a decent yarn. Instead, Mr Phillips uses the Bush family to illustrate a host of pet historical and cultural theories, including his personal take on Britain's 17th-century restoration in which Mr Bush is compared, oddly, to Charles II.

It is not just that the story ricochets backwards and forwards at a dizzying rate; the historical analogies are all over the place. Fair enough, today's Protestant fundamentalists are a little like Oliver Cromwell's Ironsides ("who knew more about the geography of the Holy Land than about the English terrain two counties away"). But it is very odd to jump from the Plantagenet kings to invading Iraq; or from the House of Karadjordjevic to America's "aristophilia in the 1980s and 1990s".

The author admits that he had planned to write a more conventional book about dynastic politics, but then his "unhappiness" with the president and his family took over. So why are so many people unhappy with Mr Bush? Could it have something to do with the Millwall attitude? Mr Clinton seemed to be stuck in an argument with his detractors. Mr Bush simply does not care. In fact, he actually seems to revel in the idea that some people don't like him-and that gets up people's noses.