Joe Knippenberg takes apart Kevin Phillips’s American Theocracy: "I didn’t need Phillips to convince me that we’re overly dependent on oil, especially from sources not particularly friendly to the U.S., and that our personal and public debt loads are problematical. I also didn’t need him to convince me that we’re not necessarily effectively competing with our Asian counterparts when it comes to cultivating technological brainpower. But to blame our failure effectively to confront these issues on the malign Christian influence on the Bush Administration and on America as a whole is more than a stretch."