Mark Crispin Miller is Sexy and Naked?

There I am at the Huffington Post, the prog blog / website run by Republican turned Republican-hater Arianna Huffington. Huffington runs a neat little thing called the Contagious Festival, where you can post funny, political flash bits. The more people watch and forward your post, the higher it rises in the rankings. Once a month, a panel of judges (including Huffington, John Cusack and the Yes Men) looks at the ones at and near the top of the list and chooses a winner.

If I'm not careful, I could spend all day clicking these things. Instead, I choose one. It's called "Sexy Naked Lady." I click knowing that I'm not going to get a sexy naked lady. I don't want to be taken to a sexy naked lady. I realize it's a come-on.

Nevertheless, I am mightily pissed off by the end of the Contagious item (which, by the way, is consistently near the top of the list). Why? Because it is an old-fashioned hard-sell (think car dealer ads) piece hectoring me and others to get Mark Crispin Miller's book Fooled Again, which argues that W and his pals stole the 2004 election, and that they will keep getting away with it in the coming elections too, if nothing is done to stop them.

The ad -- what else could you call it? -- has just about everything I hate about a lot of American activist discourse (on both sides): the shouting, the us vs. them all-or-nothing tone, the absolute conviction that WE ARE BEING SHUT OUT. The ad says the book hasn't had a single review in a national publication. Well, Farhad Manjoo gave it a lot of ink (er, whatever) in Salon. But Manjoo calls it a "vacuous, tendentious collections of pseudo-journalism", which, I guess, discounts Salon from being a national publication. Manjoo must be working for The Man. Of course, Miller also got to write a major feature ("None Dare Call it Stolen") in Harper's, but that doesn't count either, because it's not a review.

Maybe it's a great book, I don't know. Maybe Bush and his cronies stole the election. I wouldn't put it past them. What gets me here is being shouted at, and being urged to market a book as if it were a profound civic duty. You know, even an attempt at a bit of humour or some graphics (other than screaming headline-style text) would have made a difference.

But what do I know? Maybe it will win this month's Contagious.