John Avlon selling his ridiculous book on Wash. Journal this a.m.

[ensho]

his book is on wingnuts from both sides, he says.

said right wing wingnuts aren't racists.

said dem wingnuts are the same as right wingnuts.

he worked for NY city govt. during 9/11 and it was the planes that knocked down all the bldgs. ya sure.

the the anti vietnam protesters were wingnuts too.

hope few people by this icky book by this icky man.

[Berry Cool]

1. He is the KING of false equivalency.

I saw his idiotic book in a bookstore over the weekend. It has cartoons on the cover of three characters with outsized "real photograph" heads on their bodies: Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and...Keith Olbermann.

Why? Because they're ALL "wingnuts." They're ALL equally wackjobs in his eyes. The only difference is, two of them are on the right and the other's on the left.

This is the kind of shit Avlon writes and advocates on CNN (which he also claims is the only "politically neutral" and "fair" network--he says Fox is far-right and MSNBC is far-left. Yet more idiotic false equivalency).

Earlier this year, he drew up a list of the "Top 10 Wingnuts for 2009" and went on CNN to plug it. Both Michele Bachmann and Ed Schultz made his list. Yes, ED SCHULTZ. Why? Because he had the audacity to say that Republicans would rather see you dead than see health care reform passed. Which is an OBVIOUS exaggeration in the world of Avlon...therefore, he's a wingnut!!!!

This would be laughable if Avlon wasn't a former speechwriter for Rudy 9iu11ani. But here's the weirdness of it all...in his book, from the cover onward, he tries to make the case that there are just as many wingnuts on the left as on the right and they are doing just as much damage on both sides, yet his case is laughable. His book is 304 pages long--and with the exception of 7 1/2 pages devoted to making the (highly unconvincing) case that Keith Olbermann is as wacky and dangerous a wingnut as all the lunatics on the right (which I guess is what earned him a place ON THE COVER OF THE BOOK!), it's almost all about right-wing wackies of every variety. Yeah, it mentions 9/11 truthers, but a lot of the left hates them too, so they're really not very evidential of lefty wackos. He makes a swipe at Ed Schultz, again with the stuff about how he once said Republicans want you dead, so he must be a lefty loon. (Interestingly, he says nothing about Rachel Maddow at all--not a word--despite his claims, obviously based on the primetime lineup, that MSNBC is a "radical left" news network--naturally, he fails to mention Joe Scarborough either). Oh, and he gives a list of "wingnut organizations" in the back. The only one that can truly be called lefty? Code Pink.

It's really bizarre...it's quite obvious that despite his constant attempts to claim himself to be an "independent" who walks the political middle, Avlon is a right-winger through and through. Yet he spends most of his "Wingnuts" book describing and deriding right-wing wackjobs. But then he goes and tries to make like he's criticizing the left equally because, well, they are just as wingnutty and crazy and bad, look at that Olbermann! Look at that Schultz! Yet you get the feeling even he knows he's desperately stretching the truth to fit his posturing.

I mean, even in his seven-and-a-half pages on Olbermann, he doesn't do a good job of demonizing the guy. He mentions that during his job at ESPN Keith made Suzy Kolber cry, but then devotes just as much space to pointing out that Keith wrote an introspective and apologetic column for Salon about it years later. He even implies a belief that the Special Comments are impassioned but thoughtful. The whole section about Olbermann comes off as saying "He's really a decent kinda guy--I just wish he wasn't such a WINGNUT." At the same time, he goes on for pages and pages about Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and so on, and how nutty they are. It's almost as if someone forced him to put the stuff about Olbermann and Schultz in there against his will. Yet at the same time, he regularly goes on CNN and spouts off about how the left and the right are equally bad when it comes to senseless shouting rhetoric and falsehoods...so he must really think it's true.

The false equivalency in this book is just horrid. It seems to have been written for people who don't pay attention to politics at all and are just looking for "a pox on both their houses" confirmation of why they shouldn't. Anyone on the right who picked it up would have to be more angered than comforted by it, because if they expected their side to come out looking good just because there's a picture of Keith on the cover, it doesn't. Like I said, the picture of Keith is very deceptive, because the 7 1/2 pages on him are by far the biggest part, and almost the only part, of the book devoted to anything other than deriding right-wing insanity. Which is pretty weird, coming from a right-winger trying to pretend he's not really a right-winger.