When Frank Rich was the drama critic for The New York Times, his nickname was “the butcher of Broadway.” He now writes for the Times about culture and politics, prompting Slate magazine to re-name him “the butcher of the Beltway.” His new book, “The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina,” is an unsparing look at the Bush administration. Rich was invited on “Today” to discuss his book. Read an excerpt:

Chapter one
The summer of 2001 had been one of national torpor, with some cheap entertainment for spice. The still-novice president was vacationing in Crawford, Texas, but he was hardly the only American gone fishing. In New York, the tabloids whipped up a frenzy about the legal travails of a marginal but conspicuously wealthy thirty-year-old show-business publicist, Lizzie Grubman, who in an apparent fit of impatience had plowed her SUV into a crowd outside a nightclub in the Hamptons and then fled. The rest of the country, having quickly determined that the murder of the wife of the actor Robert Blake was too B-list to qualify as an O. J. Simpson rerun, feasted instead on Gary Condit.

A back-bencher congressman from Modesto, California, Condit could not explain the abrupt disappearance of a twenty-four-year-old Washington intern, Chandra Levy, with whom he may or may not have had an extramarital affair. In retrospect, the Condit affair (or non-affair — we never did find out) was the last gasp of the fin-de-siècle Clinton culture and its bread and circuses of sex scandals. With Bill Clinton gone from center stage, the country had to settle for a dim-witted Price Club surrogate — and did. Desperate pundits worked overtime to turn a pale understudy into a star.

The Condit-Levy soap opera was a snapshot of a waning era. It quickly mushroomed into a classic 24/7 cable TV mediathon in the O.J.-pioneered format. A nugget of salacious news was rapidly inflated with acres of speculation, a large cast of supporting players, and teams of bloviating “experts” — the familiar set of ingredients that has become electronic journalism’s equivalent of Hamburger Helper. The circus provided continuous infotainment for a nation with time on its hands.

NBC VIDEO Frank Rich on his new book Sept. 19: "Today" show host Matt Lauer talks with Frank Rich about his new book on the Bush administration, "The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina." Today Show Books

The moralists and publicity seekers (often one and the same) turned out in full force. “Condit makes our former president look like the model of monogamy,” observed Jonathan Turley, one of the many Monica-era talking heads who seized an opportunity for renewed television face time. But while Condit was a Democrat, he was a conservative Democrat who had once co-sponsored a bill calling for the display of the Ten Commandments in public places. In the end, about the only person in America to stand up for the guy was the virtuecrat William Bennett, who entered the fray to argue that Condit belonged on a higher moral plane than the philandering president whom Bennett had spent the past decade vilifying. “Hypocrisy is better than no standards at all,” Bennett explained, coining a maxim that would come in handy two years later, when he was exposed as a gambling addict with losses of at least eight million dollars.

If there was a real moral to Condit’s tale, however, it had nothing to do with sex; it was that the culture valued a politician’s performance above all else. And Condit had steadfastly refused to perform. He didn’t apologize for anything. He didn’t express sorrow for the Levy family. He didn’t cry. Other politicians, pundits, and citizens faulted him for not being phony enough — for not being as good an actor as Bill Clinton. As the self-appointed voice of the masses, Bill O’Reilly of Fox News Channel’s O’Reilly Factor, elaborated after Condit gave a TV interview to ABC’s Connie Chung in August, “This guy doesn’t look like he’s broken up about this at all …  If I were Condit, I would have cried. He could have done the lip thing.” The conservative commentator William Kristol astutely observed that politicians of all stripes were most likely to “condemn Condit for terrible P.R. judgment — not for being a terrible human being.”

MORE FROM TODAY BOOKS: HISTORY POLITICS

Andrew Jackson: An ‘American Lion’

Andrew Jackson: An ‘American Lion’ Naomi Wolf calls for a revolution Book helps feed your brain every day Quiz: Name these famous personalities Whatever happened to ‘Patriotic Grace’? Bush, McCain and an infamous hug Excerpt: Roald Dahl’s secret mission Book reveals secret Iraq mission, more Excerpt: Why we drive the way we do Capturing the essence of ‘Mandela’   Add Today Books: History Politics headlines to your news reader: