In an essay about his new book Hostile Takeover, David Sirota compares American politics to The Matrix ("the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth") before unleashing a barrage of frenzied populism:
The fact is, most of that nonsensical political discourse is designed to hide the two fundamental truths that nobody wants to talk about, but everyone knows: that our "democracy" is really a legalized bribery, and that every outcome in this system of legalized bribery is one that exclusively serves the interests of Big Money.
"Legalized bribery"? "[E]xclusively serves the interests of Big Money"? We can have a serious discussion of the role of money in politics, but this kind of rhetoric makes Bill O'Reilly look subtle.
Later in the post, Sirota raises the quality of our nation's political discourse by suggesting former New Republic Peter Beinart wants to kill "dark-skinned people":
[The] "left" in the media is largely occupied by out of touch elitists a la Tom Friedman, Joe Klein and Peter Beinart – loafers on the Washington cocktail party circuit who want us to believe that the real problem facing America is that politicians aren't supportive enough of job outsourcing, are actually too populist, or are not sufficiently willing to indiscriminately bomb enough dark-skinned people throughout the world, respectively.
I haven't read Sirota's book yet, but if you're interested in the problems with his previous handiwork, make sure to check out my posts and Spinsanity's work on the Center on American Progress, where he used to serve as the Director of Strategic Communications. Sirota was also the "principal author" (PDF) of MoveOn's Daily Mislead, which we also criticized at Spinsanity. In short, he's a key figure in the emerging liberal PR machine that we warned about in the conclusion to All the President's Spin.
[Disclosure: I worked on Joe Hoeffel's Congressional campaign during the summer of 1998. Sirota joined the campaign as I was leaving to study in Australia during the fall semester. I don't know him personally.]
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