The new American media has become a world parallel to our own. Cable news, talk radio, and the World Wide Web have changed how critical information about events is received, closing up the hole of straight news delivery in deference to a wider chasm of opinions on current events. What we read, see, and hear is largely tailored to fit within our own established views and doesn’t often leave room for dissent.

This disturbing trend has infiltrated our understanding of government from the blathering of Rush Limbaugh on the Democratic Congress, self-styled bloggers commenting on the Iraq War from the comfort of their home offices, to book and magazine publishers who distribute material that is clearly biased. The American justice system is scrutinized regularly in this new journalism, as many television and Internet “analysts,” authors, and pundits try to capture the imaginations of those representing the court of public opinion.

In U.S. vs. Bush, former U.S. Attorney Elizabeth de la Vega performs a ritual dance for those holding a progressive political view. Using publicly available documents and largely unattributed quotes from officials, de la Vega chisels evidence for a fictional indictment against President George W. Bush, Vice-President Richard Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and former Secretaries of Defense and State Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell respectively, for fraudulently convincing Congress and the American people of the necessity to invade Iraq.

In the beginning of U.S. vs. Bush, de la Vega tries to establish a connection between the fraud she accuses Bush of with the Enron scandal. She writes, “The main charge (in the Enron case) was conspiracy to defraud: that is, conspiring to deceive investors by manipulating financial data, making false and misleading statements, and deliberately omitting important facts in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 371.” The basis for her indictment against Bush is the same law as quoted.

Within the narrow confines of the progressive court of public opinion, de la Vega succeeds admirably. She trumpets well-known documents such as the Downing Street Memos, International Atomic Energy Agency reports on Iraqi weapons capabilities, sections of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on prewar intelligence assessments in Iraq, and passages from former terrorism czar Richard Clarke’s book Against All Enemies and Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack and Bush at War and parts of the 9/11 Commission Report as evidence of the fraud.