Bill PressCritiques

If you're the type of person who can tolerate someone who identifies Fox News as the network of the Republican Party, or can tolerate someone poking fun of the Fox News slogan as being "Fair and Balanced", you'll at least be able to get through, if not enjoy, this book. Otherwise, if you're a firm believer that Fox News is in fact "Fair and Balanced", and all the other news networks are left leaning and biased, I wouldn't suggest reading this book. If you do, you'll probably just end up throwing it against the wall and breaking something.

Besides taking a dim view of Fox News, another favorite target of Bill Press are the Koch Brothers. It's a close call as to which takes more abuse, but both certainly get their turn.

In a style similar to TV's Jon Stewart, in which Stewart shows a quote from a politician and then takes it apart, Press uses quotes of many Conservatives against themselves. And as the book title indicates, he also tries to make the point that in many cases, attacks on the President are personal rather than policy driven, and often distort the facts. While in most cases, Press makes his point, in some cases he tends to throw in an extra invective or two, which is unnecessary, because his numerous references can and do stand on their own.

well-written and "biased". Reality has a liberal slant. Well-researched but not an in-depth consciousness altering tome. Oh, also triggering and depressing as hell but that's not the author's fault.

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Rating: 4* of five

The Book Description: In Toxic Talk, Bill Press exposed the ways in which the extreme right-wing media has done an end run around the American voting populace by exerting a disproportionate control over open political debate. In The Obama Hate Machine, Press returns to show how the Right has taken rhetoric to slanderous new levels in attacking the nation’s forty-fourth president.

While presidents and presidential candidates routinely have been subject to personal attacks, the outright disdain Obama’s extremist opponents have for the facts has inspired an insidious brand of character assassination unique in contemporary politics.

Obama was born in Kenya . . . Obama sympathizes with Muslim terrorists . . . Obama is a communist who wants to institute death panels and touch off class warfare…The extent to which these unfounded assertions have taken hold in the American mindset shows just how ruthless, destructive, and all-powerful the right-wing machine—hijacked by extremists in the media and fueled by corporate coffers—has become. The author reveals how corporate interests such as the infamous Koch Brothers continue to steer political coverage away from fact-based dialogue into the realm of hysteria. Bill Press also observes this phenomenon is not limited to the airwaves and provides an “I Hate Obama Book Club” list, calling out the scores of anti-Obama tomes—and even some from the Left—that have helped drag politics even deeper into the mud.

In his characteristic on-the-mark arguments sure to appeal to anyone on the Left or in the Center, Press shows how the peculiar nature of Obama-hating subverts issue-driven debate and threatens not only the outcome of the 2012 election but the future of the American democratic system.

My Review: I do not know what to say about this book. The people who should read it won't. The people who do read it will, if not sociopathic by nature, weep uncontrollably for the horrific fate of our country.

I tell myself that it's good, this outrage and pain I feel when reading the horrors perpetrated in the name of partisan conservatism, because when I stop feeling those feelings it will mean that I have given up any hope for change AWAY from the viciousness, the brutal ignorant selfishness, that is characteristic of today's “conservatives.”

Go to the library. Read Chapter 5, “The Brothers.” Sixty pages of documented and repugnant thuggery perpetrated by the Koch brothers against the democratically elected president of the United States of America. If it stirs in you no outrage against the monstrous, vile, and greedy people who pretend to care about the fate of the Americans who do the work that makes them rich, go buy your jackboots and practice your “Sieg heils” because that's the world people like you are passively agreeing to live in.

The Right is WRONG. And their actions against President Obama (not my favorite person, but still he's the president) are very, very, very close to seditious. They talk treason and call it free speech...which they've paid their millions to ensure for themselves and their horrifying, selfish, greedy views.

I tell myself it's good that these betrayals hurt me so, these smacks in my besotted citizen's face, because when they don't hurt anymore, I'll have given up on change, on reason, on life. I skate ever closer to this dread eventuality.

This book has an excellent premise: Republicans have usurped the name of Jesus Christ and applied it to a number of completely irregligious ideals, and that extremely conservative Christians have distorted the morality and message of the Bible. However, he is so rabid, so reactionary in his writing that it is almost impossible to read it and not want to defend the other side. He is trying to match poison (a la Anne Coulter or Bill O'Reily) with poison, which makes him as disagreeable to read.
Dump the polemics and stop distorting history and the Constitution as much as the Religious Right does. The moderates and liberals need a kick in the pants to reclaim faith as a part of their lives and even their party, but they don't need to be so rude about it or make so many leaps in logic.

He was right on one front, though-God and Jesus were neither Republicans or Democrats. Nobody has sole claim to religious teachings.½

Review to follow...