Bill Sammon begins his book Misunderestimated with George W. Bush staring out of his limousine at “a thousand angry demonstrators—maybe more—rampaging through the streets of Portland, Oregon.” He depicts the police as losing control of the situation, the president’s life being in danger, and the crowd “seething with hatred.”

For the twenty-four pages that he describes the incident, it’s the “commander-in-chief,” and his polite, well-dressed guests (he was in Portland for a fund raiser) against the hordes in “T-shirts and jeans, do-rags, and dreadlocks.”

Eventually, according to Sammon, everybody made it into the fund raiser, the unruly mob dispersed, and having paid $2,000 just to attend plus $25,000 to have their picture taken with the president, we may suppose that everybody had a good time.

The last line of the chapter is full of foreboding. “The president didn’t know it as he gazed out the window of his limousine, but he had just caught a glimpse of the Next Big Thing in politics: the rise of the Bush haters.” (Sammon must have forgotten that there were protests at George W. Bush’s inauguration.)

It may have happened that way, but we’ll never know based on Sammon’s book. He reports everything as if he were an eyewitness, without attribution, and his book contains no notes.

We do know that there were other points-of-view. One news story, admittedly from the far left, is headlined “Police attack anti-Bush demonstrators in Portland.” It reports nearly unrestrained police violence on the protesters, bystanders, and media covering the protests. Later several people sued and collected damages from the police actions.

My problem is that, just as some people would dismiss the leftist news story because it comes from a Socialist Web Site, I am very skeptical of Sammon’s version because he is a Bush true believer who almost chokes on verbs and adverbs as he characterizes the Republicans as good, loyal Americans and pretty much everybody else as either weak, disloyal, or not very bright. In his book, Bush “thunders,” and UN Secretary General “tut-tuts,” although it must be difficult to talk while tut-tutting. Also, Howard Dean “harrumphed,” also a difficult way to talk.

I read a lot of history, especially political history, and I know every book has a point of view, some more slanted than others. However, I shudder to think that some years from now a high school student will use a book like Sammon’s as a source for a research paper. In this book, George W. Bush wisely refuses to invade Iraq until he has won the war in Afghanistan (despite the fact that US fatalities in Afghanistan were higher every year after the invasion of Iraq than they were before the invasion). And they’ll learn that Secretary of State Colin Powell demanded and received unassailable proof before he went before the UN to put the US’s case to the world, but doesn’t note—because the book was written in 2004—that Powell called the speech a lasting blot on his record in 2005.

Sammon also gives a play-by-play of the president’s 30-minute fly-out to the Lincoln for the Mission Accomplished speech, even though there were eight people on the two planes, and he wasn’t one of them. We see the president taking the stick and flying in formation with the other plane (at that point being piloted by Andy Card, who had no pilot training). We see him humbly handing the stick back for the carrier landing. And when he gets out of the plane, we hear his pilot thanking him for “bringing grace and dignity back to the White House.”

I won’t pretend that I expected to agree with Sammon when I checked the book out of the library. I won’t even claim that I approached it with an open mind. I’m one the minority that became a majority (US citizens who think that the invasion of Iraq was a really bad idea). I’m one of the people disgusted with Rumsfeld’s dismissive response regarding the fact that soldiers in Iraq were being injured because the vehicles weren’t properly armored (You know you go to war with the army you’ve got, etc.). I’m also one of those English majors who cringed when the leader of the free world invented words like “misunderestimated.” But that’s not what this is about.

The point is that it seems as if our history is being written by those on the political edges with little regard for truth or accuracy. This isn’t a new thing; in the 19^th century each of the political parties had its own paper, and that paper’s job was to praise its candidates and slam its opponents. However, they were openly partisan.  Unlike the partisan papers, this book—and dozens of others on both sides of the political spectrum—attempts to cleverly disguise itself as a serious study of the subject.

I’m sure Sammon is familiar with the concept of attribution; he was the Washington Times Senior White House Correspondent, and he has since been Fox’s Washington Bureau Chief. I’m sure he knows better. But for the sake of all those future high school students who might be trying to understand the United States in the years between 2002 and 2004 I just wish he had done better.