Because I just read "The Librarian" and it was great fiction! He wrote Fog Facts after, and expanded on a few of the comments he had made in the story...
Fog Facts : Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin
From Publishers Weekly
Beinhart scored satirical points last fall with his novel The Librarian, about an archivist whose talent for digging up damaging truths frightens a vast right-wing conspiracy with more than a passing resemblance to the current administration. The novel introduced the concept of the "fog fact": published information that remains unnoticed by the public. This slim volume promises to gather various fog facts about George W. Bush's presidency, but offers much more opinion than fact—specifically, amazement that reporting on subjects like the allegations that Bush pulled strings to avoid going to Vietnam or committed insider trading while his father was president didn't cost him either the 2000 or 2004 election. Beinhart sees the media's failure to call more prominent attention to political lies as the source of many Americans' "delusional" worldview, which he says led to war in Iraq. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Book Description
Everyone in the world knows what Bill Clinton did with Monica Lewinsky, or the sordid facts about the O.J. Simpson case. Ask them about the in and outs of the British Royal Family, or what happened to Brad and Jennifer and you'll find they're pretty clued in. These facts, or events, or factoids, mysteriously capture the world's attention and creates a media frenzy. But there's a flip side to this. Fog Facts — the important things that nobody seems able to focus on anymore than they can focus on a single droplet in the mist. They are known, but not known; the sort of things that journalists and political junkies know, but somehow the world does not. Such as President Bush's war record (he doesn't have one), or how Dick Cheney became that rich. Who really won the election in Florida 2000 and how many people have perished since the invasion of Iraq. Beinhart's book is a dazzling and unsettling exploration of how this has come to pass, about "The Soft Machine," a mysterious mechanism that manufactures consent in a so-called democratic society and how ordinary citizens can fight back.
customer review
Makes the case for a People's Bank-Union-Intelligence Agency-Google, October 23, 2005
Reviewer: Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) - See all my reviews
This is quite an extraordinary book, one of five I picked up while browsing at Barnes & Noble today. It gets a full five stars for elegant writing, logical presentation, and a lovely index. I read it together with Noam Chomsky's "Imperial Ambitions" interviews, and the two complement one another.
"Fog facts" are facts that are out in the open, but "invisible" in the sense that no one acts on them. The stolen Florida election--30,000 plus disenfranchised blacks *and* "overcount" votes where Al Gore was both checked and written, rejected as invalid instead of returned for verification--the specious claims against Iraq; the 9-11 Commission apologia; the list goes on. For myself, the most interesting fog facts dealt with the number of terrorists caught and jailed by France and other nations, as a tiny fraction of the cost of invading Afghanistan and Iraq, and with little to show for it excepts casualties, including significant numbers of US amputations being concealed from the public.
The author "outs" Judith Miller as an agent of Karl Rove in the run-up to the war in Iraq, earnestly selling the Administration's line on weapons of mass destruction, and perhaps one reason she was both favored by Rove in the current Valerie Plume case, and also sought to protect Rove.
THe author gets the jump on the current scandal of the disappearing billions in Iraq--not just the billions for Halliburton in sole source contracts, but the outright theft and squandering of the $19 billion in Iraqi bank credits that Paul Bremer managed to fritter away--and they still do not have running water or electricity.
THe author quotes several times from Mein Kamph in discussing the extremist Republican use of "the big lie" and the comparisons are disconcertingly clear. He weaves a tale of draft-dodging hypocrisy among the Bush Junior and Cheney gang that is all too distasteful when combined with their corruption in favoring Halliburton--his listing of Cheney's ignominious failures as CEO of HAlliburton are fun--and also a sign that Halliburton knew what it was doing in suffering the fool that would deliver the people's treasure. His accounting of Bush Juniors many failures in business, each time living on his father's name and getting bailed out by the forgiving rich that he has repaid many times over with tax cuts and exemptions from asbestos claims, among other loopholes, is dismaying in the extreme. We "know" these things, but we do not act.
On page 82 he repeats what is now perhaps the most famous quote to come out of the Bush Junior White House, where an arrogant aide dismisses a "reality-based" person and says that the U.S. is an empire now, and makes its own reality. That the reality we are making is one of our own destruction escapes this witless aide to the President, so full of himself is he.
The books adds to my understanding of the current Social Security arrangements as a pass through system (each generation funds the next) as opposed to the Administration's proposal for privatization, which converts it to a pension fund that dies with each generation. I am persuaded that we must defend Social Security, it is present form, to the death, and that we must remove the caps and make the wealthy contribute for every dollar, not just up to $90,000.
The author concludes that there is a war today, not between civilizations, but between faith-based and reality-based communities.
I put the book down reflecting to myself that it is time for the American labor union pension funds to lead a revolution. It is time for the people to form their own bank, their own credit card company, their own intelligence agency, and their own media. Although this is happening in fits and starts with the Internet, it is disjointed. We need to marry up money, willpower, and honest information, and we need to out these carpetbaggers and regain control of the commonwealth.
Truth and morality are here to be found, but the question that remains is: will the people act? This is a very fine book for anyone who cares about future generations and resents being robbed.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1560257679/sr=8-1/qid=1142062478/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-6814585-0184832?%5Fencoding=UTF8
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