This month we will elect a new president. And I must admit I’ll feel sorry for whoever wins, because the winner’s going a inherit a near-catastrophic mess from ol’ W. Certainly I had low expectations when he took office, but the havoc he’s wreaked over the last eight years has been nothing short of astonishing.

A prime target to take down, one would think, for the occasionally muck-raking Oliver Stone, who’s got the prez in his sights in his latest movie, the appropriately-titled W. Except he ends up pulling his punches. Like Nixon, the new film also has some measure of sympathy for the man. And the performances are excellent; I especially enjoyed James Cromwell’s Bush senior and Richard Dreyfuss’ teeth-gnashing Cheney. But the film never gets under the surface of its subject the way Nixon did. Stone posits a father-son conflict lying at heart of Bush (the son’s) motivations, but I wasn’t totally convinced. And how could Mr. Conspiracy Theory not take the opportunity to scrutinize two possibly stolen presidential elections?

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One could even say Stone was perhaps too nice to Bush. Don’t count on former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi making the same mistake, as the title of his latest book makes clear: The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder (Vanguard Press). The author of Helter Skelter and the massive Oswald-acted-alone-dammit! tome Reclaiming History (favorably reviewed in these very pages) contends that by taking our country to war under false pretenses, Bush deserves to charged with murder.

“I just want to put this guy where he belongs; on death row,” Bugliosi told me during a recent visit to Seattle. “I cannot tolerate the fact that over 100,000 people are in their graves and no one is doing anything at all to George Bush. Nothing. No impeachment, no investigation of him.

“I wanted to get it out while Bush was still in office, so it could help in the impeachment effort,” he continued. “Although I want to go way beyond impeachment. Because impeachment, he’s still a free man. And so far, no one is doing anything at all to him. Clinton was impeached, almost driven from office; the right wing wanted to hang him from the lamppost in the town square at noontime for doing nothing. And this guy takes a nation to war under false pretenses and no one is doing anything at all.”

Though Bugliosi speaks quietly, there’s a constant intensity that reveals how strongly he feels about the issue. “This is the only book out there that says, ‘Hey, let’s do something,’” he explains. “All the other books [critical of Bush] are good, but they’re just revelations; like there’s a recent revelation that the White House ordered the CIA to forge a document linking Saddam with al Qaeda. It’s wonderful stuff, and if I were prosecuting Bush, whatever witnesses told the author that would be witnesses for me at the trial. But where does it go from here? This is the What now, Where do we go from here book. The only book that says this is a legal blueprint for doing something about it.”
Are you surprised Bugliosi’s had difficulty securing much coverage for his book? “I knew there would be a certain resistance,” he admitted. But I did not expect such a blackout. Not to this extent. My publicist said she’d never seen another book in over 30 years that was blacked out like this. No major newspaper to this day has reviewed this book. No network or cable would have me on. It got so bad that ABC Radio refused to take money for a radio spot, an ad! People are just terrified of the book. And they haven’t even read it!”

Even a story about the “blackout” in the New York Times didn’t open the door to more coverage, as Bugliosi and his publicist hoped. “And I’m not suggesting there’s any conspiracy,” he said. “It’s just that everyone in the media agrees that they want to stay away from this book the way the devil stays away from holy water. And I don’t understand it. This is supposed to be the United States of America, freedom of speech and expression being our most cherished constitutional right, no man’s above the law, all that stuff. And to not even review the book? It’s mind-boggling. It says something about what this country has become.”

Bugliosi certainly gives you much to think about. The book is also laced with a bitter humor, as when he denounces the “very weak ‘liberal media’… physiological marvels who are somehow able to sit erect in front of a camera without a spine,” and condemning the lumbering American public as either “the Walking Dead” or “sheeple.”

Yet even if it’s been ignored, the book was still able to be published in this country. Will that still be the case ten years down the line?