Long-time political and environmental columnist Edward Flattau will surprise few who are long familiar with his environmental philosophy with his damning portrait of the Bush administration's environmental record in his new book Peering Through the Bushes.

Flattau takes no prisoners, none, in his "broad impressionistic picture of the causes, impacts, and implications of Bush's controversial environmental policies."

Acknowledging no hesitancy in putting forward "subjective judgments about the president's character and motivation on those matters," Flattau writes that "Junior is much more enamored of conservative ideology than his father was, and is seemingly even less convinced of the imminence and gravity of environmental threats." His rhetoric damns the administration's "preconceived, narrowly drawn ideological nostrums" and dismisses the administration's record as "a tale of deception, delusion, intractable doctrinaire thinking, indifference, and regulatory rollbacks."

Despite the president's "folksy-populist charm," Flattau sees something more sinister, "the elitist mentality of a board chairman who doesn't take kindly to having his authority questioned" and whose administration's pattern of late-Friday Federal Register announcements "invites journalistic neglect."

Flattau characterizes Bush as "far more of a 'green' menace than Reagan because of the ability to operate in a manner that does not attract attention." He acknowledges that his 139-page paperback, published by Xlibris Corporation, may amount to a small "gift" to the Kerry/Edwards campaign, one he hopes might at least influence a few undecided voters in a potentially very close race.