A lively debate has broken out on the blog between Mary Cunningham and “Danny” about whether the Bush administration bears any responsibility for the current financial crisis. They go into much more detail than I am capable of, so I suggest that readers take a look.

But let me make one simple point. This crisis is taking place in the eighth year of the Bush presidency. It must have very deep roots indeed, for the Bush administration to bear no responsibility.

In my original post, I used the phrase that the crisis happened “on Bush’s watch”. As Samantha Power pointed out to me at our recent lunch, this is a highly ambiguous phrase. Power was wearing one of those irritating little charity bracelets. This was a green one, carrying the phrase – “Not on my watch.” She explained that this is apparently what President Bush had written in the margin of one of her own articles, on the Rwandan genocide.

But, said Power, nobody was quite sure what Bush had meant by this. Did he mean that he bore no responsibility for this terrible event, because it had all happened during the Clinton administration? Or was he promising that nothing like this would happen during the Bush presidency? Or had somebody simply placed the article on his watch – and it was a polite request for them to remove it?

Some people are good in a crisis. Unfortunately, President Bush isn’t one of them. His comments on the global financial crisis yesterday were the opposite of reassuring. The simian furrowing of the brow suggested deep confusion. The bland assertion that “our financial institutions are strong” defied credulity. He even thanked Hank Paulson, the treasury secretary, for “working over the weekend”. Yes, that’s really going the extra mile, isn’t it?

Bush’s congratulations for Paulson have a nasty echo of his comments to the head of FEMA, Michael Brown, at the height of the Hurricane Katrina fiasco/tragedy – “Brownie, you are doing a heck of a job.”

Hurricane Katrina probably showcased Bush at his very worst. But, let’s face it, he didn’t exactly cover himself in glory on 9/11. It may have been the fault of the Secret Service, but the fact that the president simply disappeared in the immediate aftermath of the attack was pretty poor. True, Bush’s subsequent appearance with the New York firemen was effective. But, generally, this is not a man who exudes competence and leadership in a crisis.

As for the president’s legacy – what can one say? He was already likely to go down in history as one of the most ill-starred occupants of the Oval Office, because of the Iraq war. Now he risks having the next “great depression” on his watch. To combine the worst legacies of LBJ and Herbert Hoover – now that would be something.

Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
By Jonah Goldberg
Doubleday $27.95, 496 pages

Heroic Conservatism: Why Republicans Need to Embrace America’s Ideals (And Why They Deserve to Fail If They Don’t)
By Michael J. Gerson
Harper One $26.95, 320 pages

Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again
By David Frum
Doubleday $24.95, 224 pages

They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons
By Jacob Heilbrunn
Doubleday $26, 336 pages

Ever since the “Reagan revolution”, conservative intellectuals have dominated the battle of ideas in American politics. But the success of Jonah Goldberg’s silly book, Liberal Fascism, suggests that American conservatism may now be in some intellectual trouble. The book has done well in the United States. It reached number three on The New York Times bestseller list. Yet it is dedicated to an absurd proposition – that American liberals are the direct ideological heirs of Mussolini, Hitler and Franco. This is the kind of ya-boo politics that has deformed American talk radio for years. But it is depressing that you can get a bestseller out of such nonsense.

Goldberg is not a stupid man. A pundit and commentator, he writes fluently and occasionally amusingly – and he has read lots of books about fascism. The opening pages of his own work are a quasi-learned dissection of the central tenets of fascism. But the purpose of the book is not to understand fascism. It is to discredit American liberals. Goldberg piles example upon example, to draw harebrained comparisons between American liberals and fascists. Liberals buy organic food. But did you know that “Dachau hosted the world’s largest alternative and organic medicine research lab and produced its own organic honey”? Well, I never.

Over the course of almost 500 pages, Liberal Fascism pursues a tedious argument of insidious intent to lead us to an overwhelmingly stupid question: “Was Bill Clinton a fascist president?” Surprisingly, the answer to this question is No. Clinton, it seems, wasn’t even good enough to deserve the label fascist: “To say that he was a fascist himself is to credit him with more ideology and principle than justified.”

The remainder of this book review essay can be read here. Comments can be made below.

Some people are too open for their own good. That was certainly how I felt after interviewing Samantha Power last week.

I had expected her, as a senior adviser on foreign policy to Barack Obama, to be ultra-careful and to weigh every word. Not at all. She was open and amusing, willing to give long discursive answers on controversial subjects, happy to admit to doubts about her abilities to do a government job. I was charmed. But I left the lunch wondering whether she was really cut out for politics.

My doubts were swiftly and brutally borne out. Ms Power was on an exhausting book tour in Britain and giving scores of interviews. In one of them, with The Scotsman newspaper, she made an off-the-record comment suggesting Hillary Clinton, Mr Obama’s rival for the Democratic nomination, was a “monster”. Within hours she was forced to resign from the Obama campaign.

The remainder of this column can be read here. Please post your comments below.