Recently, I was hanging around midtown with nothing specific to do for three hours, so I went to Barnes and Noble. While I was there, I read Peter Singer's new book, entitled "The President of Good and Evil."

Peter Singer is the guy who is often credited with starting the animal rights movement with his book "Animal Liberation." He's a philosophy professor at Princeton now. Apparently, you can't say his name in the mainstream media without prepending the word "controversial."

Anyway, some of you may have heard me threaten to write a book about the Bush White House. I've been working on this book on and off (mostly off) for about two years. Basically, the idea of my book is to measure Bush's international policies against broadly self-stated goals (e.g., are we really safer from terrorist attacks after we overran Iraq and Afghanistan?) without trying to second-guess his motives. As I explained to people about Bill Clinton, I don't really care about politicians' private lives, I care about policy.

The reason I mention Singer's book is that he takes the exactly opposite tack. I admit that my decision to look at Bush in purely political terms (as opposed to philosophical terms) is a somewhat arbitrary choice. I was a political science major, and a philosophy minor–I'd like to think that if I had switched the two, I would have written a book like "The President of Good and Evil." Calling Bush America's "most prominent moralist," Singer hangs the President with his own rhetorical rope.

Singer's book is a rational, moral argument which attacks almost every major policy decision by the White House in a refreshingly clear and straightforward manner. I won't ruin the book for you, but I will say I enjoyed it immensely.

The problem with the book, and the real reason I try to avoid making philosophical arguments when it comes to politics, is that no one has full access to Bush's innermost thoughts and motives. Singer's methodology is really very clever, and at the end of the book, he proposes several theories as to why Bush works the way he does. But they remain theories, coming perilously close to ad hominem arguments against his policies.

Singer often attempts to bridge the gap between the philosophical and political by incorporating policy analysis into his moral arguments. A good example of this would be Bush's sexual education policies: Bush states in some speech somewhere that he wishes to curb teen pregnancy. Correspondingly, he uses the Federal government's fiscal powers to corner public schools into providing abstinence-only sex ed. The problem is, abstinence-only programs have been consistently linked to higher teen pregnancy rates.

Now, for Singer, this might indicate Bush's moral deficiencies. For me, the issue is more about political efficacy; but for either one of us, abstinence-only sex ed is a failure. However, if you're a Bush supporter, it's likely you don't give a flying fuck what some study says about abstinence-only programs–they're in step with your moral universe and no amount of teen pregnancy could ever justify telling high school students it's okay to have sex. No matter how rational Singer's moral system is, it still doesn't cut it for a large part of America because it fails to incorporate Jesus being whipped thousands of times.

Nonetheless, you should all go read this book. Knowing the people who read this blog, you'll love it.

"The Complete Review" links to several other reviews of divergent biases.