Customer Reviews

Grand Theft 2000: Media Spectacle and a Stolen Election

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I write this review in direct opposition to the Publishers Weekly critique. ...

Simply, Grand Theft 2000 is a political polemic from the Left that skewers #43, #41 and the entirety of their military-minded, big-business administrative cronies: Bush is flatly called an undeserving baby and images are presented of him sitting on daddy's knee as Son of Bush, both Bushes are the heirs of Nazi money, Cheney is a devious Machiavellian, Rumsfeld is a crazed racist who resembles Dr. Strangelove -- zig heil! Perhaps you have to be involved with high culture to understand what is truly interesting about this book: it is a set of theses nailed directly to the President's door...from a Philosophy chair at a major American university! A professional philosopher engaged up to his eyeballs in political pamphleteering? And we thought this only happened in Women's Studies.

Of course, that Kellner manages to so clearly barbecue the new President with a vast amalgam of critical media facts, means that this polemic is doubly-informed as good scholarship and serves as an important historical document as well. Beyond, then, being a mere send-up of the Bushes, Grand Theft 2000 is also a powerful political text and an important counter-historical document that serves to critically inform the establishment myth even as it exposes that myth as media spectacle.

Yes, it is true that no book can say everything and Grand Theft 2000 will not serve to supplant all of its competitors -- but does it intend to? Instead, this book is a rallying call to become better informed about the past election and its meaning for the present day. Grand Theft 2000 is as an encyclopedia of valuable progressive information on the election, including a number of Internet links, and in this respect alone it deserves to be thought of as one of the more useful books to have been published about the election.

Finally, let me point out that this book has been much more favorably reviewed -- most recently by Salon -- and I submit this review now only because it deserves a better reputation than Publishers Weekly affords it. Thanks -- and hope this helps.

If this was a book worth writing and reading (it was), then it was also worth editing and proofreading. In fact, however, the book is marred by egregious redundancies, stupid typos, and other editorial lapses. The publisher's handling of this title has been unprofessional from start to finish; witness the unavailability of the book, despite the great interest in reading it (an interest that encourages Amazon.com and others to jack up the price to three figures). It would serve the author and the book if Rowman and Littlefield would simply let the book go all the way out of print and let a real publisher edit, reprint, and properly publish it.

Poorly written, childish name calling and half truths, many with no factual evidence wastes the readers time. Where are the state by state election calls--if Gore was winning by 3%, a state was called for him within 20 minutes after the polls closed--or many before the polls closed. I watched the results, and waited almost 2 1/2 hours befor Bush double digit wins in Tennessee and Arkansas were put in his column. The author is a fiction writer, I'm afraid. I was looking for facts.