Bush reads?

We know he tried real hard to read the book on 9/11. So what is W straining to read now? Anti-Imperialists Beware – Bush Is Reading Again answers the question but raises many concerns.

Indeed, Bush is known to read so little – both for official business and for diversion – and to be so impressed by the few books he does read that it is imperative for people who are paid to know what's happening in Washington to find out what's on the president's nightstand when he turns out the light.

So what are the books:

The first, "When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt After the White House", concerns his favorite presidential antecedent, whose famous or infamous 1904 Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine shortly after the Spanish-American War heralded Washington's claim to great-power status and its right to intervene unilaterally anywhere in the Americas against "chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society."
The choice may suggest that Bush, who clearly subscribes to the "great man" theory of history that was the rage in Roosevelt's time, is contemplating a very active retirement. If it doesn't take him on safari in Africa or on scientific expeditions to the Amazon (unlikely pastimes for a man who by all accounts is an unenthusiastic and incurious traveler), it could make him a permanent force in the Republican Party and for the kind of aggressive nationalism that Roosevelt espoused through much of his career.
The second book on Bush's reading list, "Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground" by Robert Kaplan, is far more worrisome in its implications, at least for the remaining three years of his presidency.
Kaplan, who began his career as a self-described "travel writer" in the 1980s, has evolved into a political thinker whose outlook is explicitly imperialist – a term that he has used and reused in recent years with unabashed approval – and, in the words of one conservative reviewer and retired Army colonel, Andrew Bacevich, "reactionary."
In his view (and one that would be shockingly familiar to Roosevelt in his "Rough Riding" days in Cuba more than 100 years ago), the "war on terror" and associated conflicts is simply a repeat of the U.S. Army's Indian Wars, but on a nearly planetary scale.
Instead of the Great Plains and western reaches of the 19th century U.S., however, today's "Injun Country," as Kaplan calls it, consists of the entire Islamic world, from the southern Philippines to Mauritania, as well as other ungoverned or misgoverned areas in desperate need of order and civilization.

Kaplan states that it is our

"righteous responsibility [is] to advance the boundaries of free society and good government into zones of sheer chaos."

Expand the empire. Bring our ways to the "savages." Bring civilization (our brand) to all corners of the world. Yeah, it does sound like to late 1800's!