Thanks to Will Grigg & the New American!

Will Grigg, who has one of the zestiest, hard-hitting political blogs anywhere, has a review of Attention Deficit Democracy in the April 17 issue of The New American.  Grigg’s article, entitled “Great Leader Democracy,” starts out as follows:

“Most Americans are disinclined to think deeply about the tyrannical actions of government, but James Bovard’s Attention Deficit Democracy will open their eyes.

“Every ruling elite covets a subject population who will trust, rather than think. This is emphatically true of our own government, observes investigative author James Bovard in his bracing new book. Surrounded by the trappings of prosperity (albeit, in most instances, purchased on credit) and marinated in rhetoric equating democracy with freedom, most Americans are disinclined to think deeply about the actions of the government that rules them. This paralyzing complacency, dangerous in the best of times, is potentially fatal in the post-9/11 era. “During this era, complacency has been punctuated with engineered outbursts of politically useful fear. Describing the Bush administration’s transparent use of terrorist threat warnings to control the tenor and tempo of the 2004 presidential campaign, Bovard writes: “Each time the feds issued a new warning of a terrorist threat after 9/11, the president’s approval rating rose by an average of almost 3 percent. As long as enough people can be frightened, then all people can be ruled. Politicians cow people on election day in order to corral them afterward.”“The message disseminated by the president and his partisans, writes Bovard, was that “blind obedience provides the equivalent of body armor for the entire nation.” And this message worked to get Bush reelected….