Occasionally the right man is at just the right place at exactly the right time with precisely the right tools, and something of real value results.

		"THE GREATEST STORY EVER SOLD" By Frank Rich. Penguin Press ($25.95)

This is one of those occasions. Frank Rich is that man, and his new book will be of particular value to those still struggling to bring this historical moment into focus.

Week in and week out, Rich writes what is surely American journalism's smartest and most original newspaper column for the Sunday New York Times. Its organizing principle is a deceptively simple one: Draw the connections between and among popular culture, mass media and our politics, and chart the way these increasingly indistinct spheres of our national life act one upon the other.

Rich has a genuine relish for popular culture and almost single-handedly has made the word "truthiness," first coined by Comedy Central comedian Stephen Colbert, an indispensable political term of art.

As Rich defines it, "truthiness" describes a situation in which it doesn't matter whether something is true: "What matters most is whether a story can be sold as true, preferably on television."

That describes precisely the stories George W. Bush and his surrogates told the American people to induce them to support war in Iraq, and Rich lays out these evasions, exaggerations and outright lies.

There's a reasoned explanation of the motives behind all this horrifically destructive deceit -- and Rich is clear in his belief that one of the casualties of the ill-considered war in Iraq has been the real war on real terrorism, which is as serious and avoidable as a fight can be.

Dick Cheney, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Paul D. Wolfowitz and the rest of the neoconservatives who came to Washington as intellectual props for a stunningly ill-prepared and "incurious" president brought with them an ideological belief that the Middle East, starting with Iraq, needed to be remade.

Karl Rove, Bush's political hit man, brought with him a single-minded loyalty and an unparalleled mastery of campaign -- which is to say, media -- technology.

Those qualities converged in the run-up to the first midterm elections following Sept. 11 and the failed attempt to apprehend Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.

Rich is particularly apt in setting the torpid cultural-political context through which the 9/11 atrocities tore like a jagged rip in a pre-digital film reel. It was, he reminds us, a summer and fall dominated by shark bites, the lackluster Gary Condit scandal and a sentimental boom in World War II nostalgia. Tom Brokaw's "The Greatest Generation" was on the best-seller lists, and Jerry Bruckheimer's "vapid 'Pearl Harbor'" was in theaters.

It also was a period in which an increasing share of the American public passively acquiesced to the provision of virtual news. Over the past five years, Rich argues convincingly, the news media's performance has been generally dismal -- by turns, supine, credulous and confused.

In Rich's appraisal, though, the Bush administration's more consequential connections have been through the rise of the cable TV news programs.

If our public conversation still were capable of making any distinctions but partisan ones, the sheer moral force of Rich's argument and the logical weight of his evidence would lay to rest the casual conservative canard that he is, somehow, an avatar of rarefied Manhattan liberalism, writing in a language that is foreign west of the Hudson.

As this book so clearly demonstrates, the very heart of his project as a writer and public intellectual is nothing fancier than a rugged American belief that facts matter and a fierce old American resentment at being conned.

It's hard to imagine values more traditional.