Posted on 09/05/2004 4:26:59 PM PDT by Ironclad
I was surprised to see this at #8 on the amazon.com best seller list, but there it is. I haven't read the book - and don't plan to - but it couldn't hurt to discourage potential buyers, or at least reduce the book's rating. From what I read of the reviews, this book is a doozy, and (outrage of the week) look at the picture of GW they used on the cover.
Unlike the left, i won't write reviews of something I haven't read, just because I don't like the assumed content.
DONE ---
I once had this guy as a professor for a class. He was good, leftwing bias but incisive. So it is unfortunate that this is just another leftwing "lying liars and the awful things they do" etc. that goes totally and completely bonkers bashing Bush and everything related to him.
It's one thing to, say, disagree with how the war on terror has been conducted, but he goes further, claiming that the Bush administration has in effect concocted the fear of terrorism in a media-driven conspiracy to advance their nefarious agenda. Tell the parents of dead schoolchidren killed by terrorists this week in Russia that terrorist fears are inflated.
The worldview makes sense only by neglecting the reality that terrorists are attacking us, and by inventing a worse bogeyman at home than exists in our enemies abroad (which he does; he fears prolife Americans more than he fears Osama Bin Laden). When media and public perception doesnt line up with the author's bias, his hermetically sealed worldview doesn't get a second look - no - the outside 'conspiracy' is to blame.
We've read this kind of stuff before, eg, Chomsky "manufacturing Consent" did the same number on the Cold War, and it was as wrong in the Communist era as it is now in the era of the War on Terror. Miller's been drinking the "not in our name" Chomsky kool-aid, and it shows. ... Like Chomsky, Miller shows you can be erudite but completely off track and totally wrong about what is really going on in the world.
Google "Alphabet City" and read the real skinny on the GWOT.
BTW: The amazon blurb says it's about how "dissent is crushed by force" in America - so how come he is writing this book from a cozy tenured chair in NYU and not on scraps of toilet paper in a re-education camp?!?
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