The publisher’s press release promoting Bruce Bartlett’s new book, “Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy,” reports that after the author was fired from his $161,000-a-year job at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a conservative think tank, “Doubleday moved the publication date from April to February.”

Too bad. The book might have benefited from another two months of editing. After wading through this book that attacks Mr. Bush for being both too fast and too slow on Katrina, too stingy and too generous with tax cuts, too kind and too harsh to big business, one starts to get the idea that issues aren’t being judged on their merits. Rather, Mr. Bartlett, a former deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, is like an angry child, grasping at anything within reach to throw at Mr. Bush.

The publisher could have used the time to remove some of the lapses of logic. Mr. Bartlett faults Mr. Bush both for a “flat-footed response to Hurricane Katrina” and for the fact that “within days he asked for and received from Congress virtually a blank check for $62.3 billion – equivalent to $62,300 for each of the 1 million people affected by the hurricane – with more to follow.” He manages to criticize Mr. Bush for tax cuts that he quotes critics charging were too small – “a Mini-Me tax cut,” “namby-pamby” – while simultaneously criticizing him for making the tax cuts too big – “more tax cuts than at any time in American history.”

Mr. Bartlett attacks Mr. Bush for betraying Reagan’s legacy, while he himself advocates a “value-added tax” that Reagan opposed. Mr. Bartlett approvingly quotes a professor who criticizes the president for being unusually “closely allied with business” and “sympathetic to large and powerful corporations” while the author also attacks Mr. Bush for imposing regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley that cost corporations billions of dollars to comply with.

More editing might also have caught some of the factual errors in this book. Mr. Bartlett claims, “Rather than talk about restoring Social Security’s solvency – an issue with wide public support – Bush talked only about private accounts. In other words, it was all sugar and no medicine.”

But Mr. Bush has talked repeatedly about solvency. In his 2005 State of the Union address, he said the system “is headed toward bankruptcy.” He went on, “Thirteen years from now, in 2018, Social Security will be paying out more than it takes in. And every year afterward will bring a new shortfall, bigger than the year before.” Further, “We must pass reforms that solve the financial problems of Social Security,” the president said.

In North Carolina on February 10, Mr. Bush said, “In 2018, the system goes red. That means there’s more money going out of the system than coming into the system.” In Iowa on March 30, 2005, Mr. Bush warned, “Pretty soon the system goes into the red.” In Mississippi on May 3, 2005, Mr. Bush referred to Social Security as “a system that’s going broke.”

Mr. Bush said this in speech after speech, so often that conservatives criticized him for going overboard. The Wall Street Journal, in a May 2, 2005, editorial headlined “The Solvency Trap,” warned Mr. Bush, “solvency pushes the entire reform debate into what Americans will lose rather than what they can gain.”

It might also be, though, that no amount of extra editing would have erased this book’s tendentiousness and inaccuracies. They are a hazard of the genre of bridge-burning books by disillusioned conservatives. Amazon.com conveniently packages Michael Lind’s “Up From Conservatism” with David Brock’s “Blinded by the Right” – “Better together,” the online bookstore says. It’s only a matter of time before you can get Bruce Bartlett’s book along with Messrs. Brock’s and Lind’s as a three-pack.

An entire chapter of Mr. Bartlett’s book is devoted to explaining how much Mr. Bush is like Richard Nixon, “one of the worst presidents in American history.” Almost as a throwaway line, Mr. Bartlett makes a charge that even most Democratic officials stop short of, referring to “growing evidence that the White House knowingly fudged the evidence on weapons of mass destruction.”

But in a sense this book is different from others of the bridge-burning genre in that Mr. Bartlett has not abandoned at least some of his conservative principles. His most impassioned criticisms of Mr. Bush involve the president’s deviation from a free-trade line on steel and textiles and his support for including prescription drugs in Medicare.

Even here logical contradictions undermine Mr. Bartlett’s argument. He manages to criticize the Medicare drug benefit both on the grounds that it is unaffordable, citing estimates that don’t take into account price controls, and on the grounds that it will lead to price controls that deter innovation. And in a chapter supposedly devoted to criticizing Mr. Bush for departing from conservative principles on free trade, Mr. Bartlett buys into left-wing nonsense about international law trumping American sovereignty, referring to “illegal elements of U.S. law” – and criticizing the Bush administration for not acting to “bring the U.S. into compliance with international law.” This is conservative?

For all of Mr. Bartlett’s criticisms of Mr. Bush’s handling of the economy – and, granted, it hasn’t been perfect – it’s difficult to argue with a presidency that has produced real GDP growth in America, outpacing the European Union and Japan. In January, the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate in America was 4.7%. Mr. Bartlett complains about the deficit, but as a percentage of GDP the budget gap it is not all that bad, and, given that it is wartime, one could argue it is too narrow.

Mr. Bartlett predicts that all this is going to end badly, with an economic downturn, a tax increase, and political punishment for Republicans, and that Mr. Bush will be to blame. More likely an economic downturn would be precipitated by the danger of Democrats taking control of the White House or one of the houses of Congress and the danger that Democrats would raise taxes. Even so, there will always be those who will fault our 43rd president for anything that goes wrong, notwithstanding evidence to the contrary. With this book, Mr. Bartlett – whether he is blinded to the point of irrationality by his hatred of Mr. Bush or by his desire to sell books to those who share it – joins their ranks.

istoll@nysun.com