From Sunday’s San Diego Union-Tribune:

Eight years later and many of us are still wondering: How in the world did George W. Bush become president? How did Dubya, of all people, even reach a point where he could become president?

Partisan carping? Sue me. Better yet, read Russ Baker’s scathing “Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America” (Bloomsbury Press, 577 pages, $30).

Baker strongly argues that Bush’s destructive policies – lying us into war, sanctioning torture and illegal wiretapping, trashing the Constitution, to name just a few – are part and parcel of the family business. And that family business maintains contacts in and utilizes a web of intelligence agencies to work on behalf of the country’s elites: social, financial, industrial, military, etc.

Left-wing paranoia? Baker, a solid investigative journalist, works hard to back up his claims – a reader could choke on the complex, interwoven details in “Family of Secrets.” He’s a man on a mission, desperate to stop the “methods of stealth and manipulation that … reflect a deeper ill: the American public’s increasingly tenuous hold upon the levers of its own democracy.”