Why Won't The Media Touch This Book?

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Mon, 23 Jan 2006 21:31:55 EST

Subject:] Why The Media Won't Touch This Book

 

 

 

I got this book, just started reading it but someone else told me that

if you can read this book and not realize they stole the election, you

have to either not want to know or you are dumber than dirt. As I said

before, the very fact that there were so many ways they cheated hurt

us because it's a few votes here and a few votes there and the big

whammy is when the machines flipped the vote...but democrats (even)

say it was penny ante because of all the other stuff. It would have

been so much better if they had just done it one way -- because this

keeps people sidetracked and thinking it couldn't have won the

election. Ohhhhhh, but it did win the election because even with all

the other ways Rove cheated -- he still needed the damned machines in

the 11th hour to win. That's how much Bush lost by.

 

 

 

Why Won't The Media Touch This Book?

Saturday, 21 January 2006, 11:48 pm

Opinion: Mark Crispin Miller

Why Won't The Media Touch This Book?

 

An email from Mark Crispin Miller

Regarding his new book Fooled Again

 

 

 

Bush/Cheney stole their re-election in 2004.

 

They stole it not just in Ohio, but all throughout the USA, from coast

to coast.

 

They stole it not by using any single ploy, but through a stealthy

combination of computerized vote theft, bureaucratic monkey business,

systematic shortages of viable equipment and old-fashioned dirty

tricks, including rampant bullying, disinformation and obstructionism.

 

Such foul play was not apparent " on both sides " in the 2004 election,

but was committed mainly by the Bush Republicans.

 

The evidence is both abundant and precise--and it's all here in Fooled

Again.

 

" This second heist of the White House is one of the great untold

stories of our time - even though it was largely carried out in plain

sight. Miller performs the simple but increasingly rare act of

journalism and gathers a mountain of overwhelming evidence from

publicly available material. This is no " conspiracy theory " stitched

together from anonymous sources, strained inferences and dark

innuendo, but a solid case based on official records, sworn testimony,

eyewitness accounts, news reports - and the Bushists' own words. "

 

Those words were published in an excellent review of Fooled Again that

will come out tomorrow--in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Also tomorrow, a

number of Web sites will be posting a review of Fooled Again by Paul

Craig Roberts, who was Assistant Treasury Secretary under Ronald

Reagan. A genuine conservative, Roberts is unafraid to read the

evidence and face reality:

 

" Miller describes considerably more election fraud than voting

machines programmed to count a proportion of Kerry votes as Bush

votes. Voters were disenfranchised in a number of ways. Miller reports

incidences of intimidation of, and reduced voting opportunities for,

poorer voters who tend to vote Democrat....

 

" The outcome of the 2004 presidential election has always struck

me as strange. Although Kerry was a poor candidate and evaded the

issue most on the public's mind, by November of 2004 a majority of

Americans were aware that Bush had led the country into a gratuitous

war on the basis either of incompetence or deception. By November 2004

it was completely clear that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass

destruction and that Bush had rushed to war. People were concerned by

the changing rationales that Bush was offering for going to war.

Moreover, the needless war was going badly and the results bore no

relationship to the rosy scenario painted at the time of the invasion.

It seems contrary to American common sense for voters to have

reelected a president who had failed in such a dramatic way. "

 

Roberts--a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, and a

former contributing editor for National Review--concludes with a

warning that the Founding Fathers would appreciate:

 

" Miller directs our attention to Bush's high-handed treatment of

dissenters. If electronic voting machines programmed by private

Republican firms remain in our future, dissent will become pointless

unless it boils over into revolution. Power-mad Republicans need to

consider the result when democracy loses its legitimacy and only the

rich have anything to lose. "

 

Despite its wealth of evidence--meticulously documented in 57 pages of

detailed endnotes--and despite the standing of its author (Miller is

an NYU professor with a solid global reputation), Fooled Again has

been pointedly ignored by the national media.

 

There have been no national reviews of Fooled Again.

 

No network or cable TV show would have the author on to talk about the

book.

 

NPR has refused to have him on. Even shows that Miller has appeared on

in the past, and more than once ( " The Connection, " " On the Media, "

" Talk of the Nation " ), have refused to him on to talk about this book.

 

Only one daily newspaper--the Florida Sun-Sentinel--has published a

review.

 

WHYY, the NPR affiliate in Philadelphia, recently refused to broadcast

paid ads for the book, offering several different and unlikely

explanations.

 

Aside from C-SPAN, Air America and Pacifica, no national media would

have the author on to tell his fellow-citizens about his findings.

 

Those few reviews of Fooled Again that have appeared were mostly

positive: Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, The

Florida Sun-Sentinel, The Chicago Reader, The Baltimore Chronicle and

other publications have all stressed the book's importance and the

soundness of its evidence. (Fooled Again is certainly the only book in

history to be highly praised by both The Christian Century and

Hustler!) In short, the media would seem to have buried Fooled Again

not because of any weakness in the book itself, but for political

reasons above all.

 

Right now the very soul of our democracy is at unprecedented risk. The

president is openly contemptuous of the very system that the Founding

Fathers put in place. He seeks to rule regardless of what Congress and

the people want, does all he can to silence the free press, has

recklessly subjected millions of Americans to government surveillance,

and demands the right to bomb and torture other peoples as the spirit

moves him.

 

And all of this goes on with little protest from the Democratic Party,

which now behaves not like the patriotic opposition but merely as a

bunch of bystanders afraid to speak out loud and clear against the

Bush administration's un-American activities.

 

At this moment, it is crucial that we openly discuss the likelihood

that this administration was not duly re-elected in 2004, any more

than it was properly elected in 2000. That national debate must take

place now, so that the people understand that their democracy had been

subverted--and, even more important, so that we can begin to talk

about electoral reform in these United States as soon as possible. The

crucial democratic conversation won't take place until the scandal of

the last election finally resonates; and that is what impelled Mark

Crispin Miller to write Fooled Again. His fellow-citizens deserve no

less than to be told what's in this deeply edifying book.

 

Mark Crispin Miller is a seasoned and effective interviewee, who has

appeared on many news programs both in the US and abroad, including

The PBS News Hour, Frontline, The O'Reilly Factor, Washington Journal,

Democracy Now! and Bill Moyers's The Public Mind.

 

*************

 

He can be reached at mark.miller , or at New York University,

at 212-998-5188.

 

Jamie Brickhouse is his publicist at Basic Books:

jamie.brickhouse .

 

ENDS