Friday, August 04, 2006

Ostroy Report Exclusive: Mark Crispin Miller's "Fooled Again" Reviewed by Mark Tucker


We're pleased to bring you this exclusive review by Mark Tucker of Mark Crispin Miller's latest book "Fooled Again," a powerful expose of election fraud in America in which he accuses the Busheviks and the GOP of hijacking the 2004 presidential race. Miller's been front and center in the election reform movement, sounding the alarm about the continuing threat from voting fraud to our Democracy.
(click here to purchase "Fooled Again")


Fooled Forever, Modus Americanus
by Mark S. Tucker
progdawg@hotmail.com

That this book is now more than a half-year old and all but invisible in the press, in book reviews, and in general colloquy is in itself alarming. That a tome so pointedly rushing to the defense of the most basic, valuable, and vulnerable fundament of American democracy, the vote, should pass without klaxons blaring from the highest guardtowers is equally a disquietingly emphatic comment on the dangers of our bought and consolidated media machinery. Ironically, that exact dilemma is one of several amalgamated toxins "Fooled Again" drags kicking and screaming into the light, delineated and exhaustive upon an unhedging interrogation of fact and circumstance. The incestuous media hierarchy illuminates why "Fooled" - despite political, investigatory, journalistic, and linguistic brilliances - languishes: the temples of the fourth estate, which formerly would’ve exalted such work, are corporately ignoring it as anathematic, which in fact it is, thank all the gawds in their manifold heavens.

Mark Crispin Miller is obviously descended from Socrates, thoroughly unencumbered by glib ideological biases or doctrinal blindsides. Thus, his book is as microscopic an unpacking of the myriad elements involved in the infamous Vote Fraud as, to make the metaphor properly, the most cogent etymological and syllogistic parsing of red herrings in a post-grad Rhetoric class. Nothing is left to faith, nothing taken for granted in a mountain of singularities. Even the small side body of sub-data accompanying it, a gatherum of bizarre and repugnant incidents which cannot be hermetically substantiated, resides in a state of circumstantiality amounting to
certainty, something any lawyer would be eager to trot into court, beaming. The vast prevalence, though, is so well researched that the stylistic avenue the author has taken, save for characteristic outrage through gritted teeth, is Chomskian: nearly every sentence is sourced and referenceable in copious end notes.

Miller, though, unlike Chomsky, makes no effort to sublimate his acid wit or pitbull cynicality, turning the reading of what can’t help but be a gooseflesh-inducing rendering into an account refreshing for its middle-class friendliness. His previous releases were noted for sardonicism, but this one laser focuses the bent far more intensely, scientifically, turning white-hot a micron below an ostensibly mannered surface. Holding nothing back, the cogency of the author’s tenets is seen no later than page 1, with a pleasingly snide marking of contrasts between foreign and domestic elections and their relative coverage by a hideously slanted American news
oligarchy.

Just as early on, Miller begins demolishing the bewildering mythology surrounding the Fraud’s manifestations, evangelical antecedents particularly to the fore, simultaneously making it evident that every “fact” surrounding the center of the controversial King Bush II has been part and parcel of an elaborate fantasy, a calculated, purposeful, driven, malevolent one. Motive for this alley of ersatz NeoCon legendry lay not only in constructing a biblical poster-boy "alfresco" but more importantly in, through Bush, providing enduring cover for in-work frauds the Party couldn’t be sure wouldn’t be later disinterred, a potent reminder that fascism isn’t merely the marriage of corporation and state but also the worship of The Glorious Leader and his shining path - in this case, the road to the LLC on the hill.

In this dizzying welter of debunkings also reposes a spate of contemporaneous and concurring asides, such as the vindication of Ralph Nader as not at all what screeching liberal mainstreamers had claimed (a spoiler). That electoral strafe on the icon, to discourage free exercise of citizen rights, was odious in the extreme, as every Constitutionalist is well aware, finally now proven in Miller’s exposition that the candidate only received .36% of the vote. If that’s a bad guy, I’ll be running for Congress, and please feel free to pose such opposition against me 24-7-365.

However, the labyrinthine trainload of facts ultimately making Miller’s "secondary" case - and Vote Fraud indeed proves not to be the top outrage here - isn’t what’s so intriguing; rather, it’s the startling revelation of a vastly more crucial primary allegation, something even an Everest of information couldn’t definitively prove, because, so far, not one document has yet been unearthed stating it nakedly. Miller’s bottom line is as basic as it is compelling, an accusation damned few have had the wit or spine to hurl, put thuswise in chapter four’s opening:

"It is not ‘conservatism’ that impelled the theft of the election, nor was it merely greed or the desire for power per se - although many of the perpetrators are insanely greedy and crave power as avidly as the troops of any other movement bent on total domination. The movement now in power is not entirely explicable in such familiar terms. Lyndon Johnson had a monstrous appetite for power, yet he would never have been part of a crusade like this one. The project here is ultimately pathological and essentially anti-political, albeit Machiavellian on a scale, and to a degree, that would have staggered Machiavelli. The aim is not to master politics but to annihilate it."

You’ll find no equal evocation of the entire Straussian putsch except in Chomsky, who’s having no truck with Vote Fraud, being preoccupied with his own menu of equally pressing concerns. That quote is Miller’s thesis statement and every page before and after proves it without reservation. In such an incisive disgorging of not only the beast’s heart but also its horribly damaged id, he joins the ilk of Greg Palast, William Greider, and Michael Parenti. Elsewhere, only Janeanne Garofalo, the irascible and prickly sometime co-host of Air America’s "Majority Report", has come close to this approach. Through Janeanne, ultimately, we get the fruit of another ignored Miller, though Garofalo has yet to, perhaps being unfamiliar with it, mention "Alice" Miller’s dissectatory analyses of tyrants throughout a work forming some the most important psychological proponencies of our time, in such landmark works as "Breaking Down the Walls of Silence." "Fooled
Again" doesn’t tread that path as such, but readily stands glaring into the
sump-house at its terminus, with Alice Miller’s revelations of the true origins of tyranny waiting to be unearthed as the start-point.

We, ladies and gentlemen, are being ruled by the monied insane in a mode of conflagrational capitalism, business gone laissez-faire berserk while diving to Plutonic depths, eating its children. "Fooled" steams through its own ears whilst listing a cornucopia of Republican paranoias, deceits, crimes, cabals, conspiracies, and the innumerable malefic whatnots we’re all presently becoming more and more aware of. In these pages, every single verifiable instance is lined up and forced to disrobe. If you thought yourself hip to the whole gig, this tour de force will remedy that, inducing chillblanes in a too comfortable misconviction.

Vote Fraud is the single most important issue of our time, the key to the
vanquishing of every Bush-generated disaster (if anyone cares to devote time to the legal considerations in a hoped-for backlash), and that’s why major works upon it, such as this, are being savagely suppressed. However, every volume about it that you can lay your hands on is an act of self-preservation. "Fooled Again" sits easily on the shelf alongside the too few bold others being similarly barred from major populist venues, and it marks Miller’s place in the world of top-flight journalism as not merely a superior writer and witheringly incisive analyst but more properly as a force to be reckoned with. Move over, Greg Palast, you’ve got company.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I had the unfortunate experience of reading this book.

BORINGGGGGGGGG.....

Do yourself a favor - read something else.

Anonymous said...

Education is not necessarily supposed to be entertaining. That expectation may be behind the "Dumbing of America." I advise all to read the book and spread the word.

Anonymous said...

Calling the book boring leads me to the conclusion that either the Anonymous poster 9:04AM does not care that his or her voice is being silenced OR did not actually read the book at all. If you care about the people you love and protecting the Constitution, you must read this book. Knowing the truth and taking action to preserve our liberties just might save your life.