ANOTHER GOOD BOOK TO READ

Arianna Huffington has written an analysis of how the wingnuts have come to dominate our politics despite having views that most Americans disagree with. In "Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe" she names two crucial co-conspirators: the "liberal" media and the Beltway Democrats. Glenn Greenwald has a good review of the book on FireDogLake and here are some of the highlights:

But the real value of this book is its examination of the two key culprits in the ascension of this right-wing fringe: the establishment media and the Beltway leaders of the Democratic Party. ... And she pinpoints the dual afflictions which have rendered the media totally supine, when they aren't actively complicit, in the face of this falsehood-spewing, extremist movement -- the twisted notion of journalistic "balance" which means that they present every claim no matter how objectively false

In sum, we are a nation that has been taken over by a political movement that holds fringe views largely because the two institutions which had the responsibility to expose the truth of what they are -- the media and the "opposition party" -- miserably failed to fulfill those functions.

It's well past time that freakshows like Ann Coulter are banned from CNN.