Oddly enough, I just got back from the mall down the street, where I had dropped by the B. Dalton on my way back from a cancelled county meeting. I went to the new non-fiction display--partly with this thread in mind--and immediately found the book by Charen. I opened to a random page and found some crazy bullshit about Noam Chomsky. Charen characterizes Chomsky as a "white hot anti-American leftist" and says that he is popular among college students. She also slams him by saying that he promotes conspiracy theories and then she excerpted one of his comments about how the U.S. is a terrorist state. She also writes that he is never on TV.
In a few concise phrases, Charen totally marginalizes Chomsky as a nutcase for any reader not familiar with him.
So why aren't we taking off the gloves to fight back?
Perhaps All Franken should team up with Michael Moore to write: "The Right Wing is a Bunch of Blathering Idiots Are Lying to You."
One thing I do religiously every week is look at the bestseller list in the Washington Post Book World. This imbalance of left versus right success at the bookstore has been a concern of mine for some time. Last year the situation got better, with Chomsky, Ehrenreich, Moore, and Schlosser being on the bestseller list at the same time. But even during the height of their popularity, you could walk into any chain bookstore and find right wing titles displayed in the new book bins and displays and books from Chomsky and Moore hidden away.
I know that William Bennett doesn't sell many books these days, but the right wing continues to churn out titles that always confront me when I step into a bookstore. Why can't the left do better in the bookselling department? Is it because the right wingers have control over radio and TV? If so, how do we knock them the hell off of that perch?
Chuck0
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"The state can't give you free speech, and the state can't take it away. You're born with it, like your eyes, like your ears. Freedom is something you assume, then you wait for someone to try to take it away. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free..." ---Utah Phillips