If you haven't read Al Gore's book,

The Assault on Reason, find a copy and read it. It will be time well spent. It brings a lot of things into sharp focus.

I'm kind of burnt out on what's wrong with this administration. I've recently read Fiasco and Hubris cover-to-cover. I don't know if I could take another one right now!

is wrong but Cheney & Bush just keep on going and going. Gonzalez is still there. Just waiting for some action now instead of the threats and words.

It really isn't about what's wrong with the administration, it is about what is wrong with political discourse and communication. It uses examples from the Bush administration to show how this breakdown in political discourse and reason have been used to screw things up, but it isn't an expose the way Fiasco or Hubris are. It is very thoughtful.

The thing I most take from it is that Al sees reality. He understands the depths of depravity that characterize the administration; he knows about the media takeover; he knows, in short, just who the enemy is and how they operate, and he has given deep thought to beating the one-way (dis)information flow that passes for public discourse in this nation. I believe he could lead us out of this mess if anyone can. And that begins with taking power. I trust him to run a winning campaign where I think any of the others stands at great risk of failing to comprehend the nature and pervasiveness of the power structure which they face. Hell, I'm not sure Kerry gets it yet, even after all that has happened to him. His analysis of 2004 seems to be that he didn't respond adequately to the Swiftboat attacks. I don't think it would have mattered much. Whatever he did, the press would have kept re-running the attack ads and given virtually no air time to his response, whatever it might have been.

The first rule of the new political game is that Democrats can't win if they depend on the mass media as their playing field. They have to get the game into new territory, and the obvious new territory is the Internet.

In the old territory, i.e. the mass media, the bias is automatically toward the Republicans, simple because the people who own the field favor them. The Republicans will get free favorable coverage no matter what, while the Dems have to pay big money for what little coverage they can get. Think of the Swift Boat ads, replayed hundreds of times for free under the guise of "news coverage." Think of the million replays of the entirely bogus Dean Scream.

The internet, on the other hand, is a very different game. Silicon Valley may be a hotbed of libertarian geeks, but most users seem to be rational, reasonably well-socialized, and highly educated--i.e., predominantly liberal, so the general tenor of net conversation is liberal, no matter what some of the major portals (e.g. AOL) try to do. The Puggies have to basically pay big bux to push their message out, hiring paid trolls and whatnot, because the medium is naturally hostile to their brand of nonsense. Sure, Drudge is out there, but more people read Kos is a lot more exciting and interesting. I bet also, if you did a content analysis of YouTube, just scoring each politically-flavored clip, you would find more liberal than conservative content. And so on.

The future of political discussion is the Internet, and that future is ours for the taking, provided we can hang on to net neutrality and openness of discourse. Information always wins over ignorance, freedom over suppression.

and thanks to DefenseLawyer for the thread.

It's awesome. I'll probably finish it after I mow the lawn.

But sadly, the more I read it, the more convinced I am that Gore won't run. He knows that the entire system, and both parties have been corrupted far past the point of no return. He knows what he'll be up against.

I don't think that he could get meaningful reform past a Democratic congress. That's how bad it's gotten.

In the 1890's in WI, all the politicians in both parties were totally owned by the fat cats, mostly the timber & railroad interests. That's when Bob LaFollette saw the light and created the Progressive movement within the Republican Party. Eventually the Progressives became an independent party and they ended up joining FDR's Democrats, but they got their start by taking over the apparatus of an existing, but totally corrupted, party and remaking it for their purposes. I think there's a role model for us in there somewhere.

general subject matter of the book?

The first question many people ask when hearing of a new book from Al Gore is, "Is it about the environment?" The answer is yes, but it's not (or, rather, not only) the kind of environment he wrote about in Earth in the Balance and of course painted such a vivid picture of in his Oscar-winning documentary (and companion book), An Inconvenient Truth. It's the political environment he's concerned about in The Assault on Reason: the way we debate and decide on the critical issues of the day. In an account that balances theoretical discussion of the foundations of democracy with a lacerating critique of the Bush administration, Gore argues that the marketplace of reasoned debate our country was founded on is being endangered by a variety of allied forces: the use of fear and the misuse of faith, the distractions of our entertainment culture, and the concentrations of power in the national media and the executive branch. In his essay and answers to our questions below, he introduces the crisis he sees, as well as the opportunity for its solution he envisions in the open forums of the Internet.

http://www.amazon.com/Assault-Reason-Al-Gore/dp/1594201226

I'm hoping to read it while camping