Why Won't The Media Touch This Book?

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 @ nyu.edu, or at New York University, at 212-998-5188.

Jamie Brickhouse is his publicist at Basic Books: jamie.brickhouse@perseusbooks.com.

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