The Bush Dyslexicon is a raucously funny ride--whether it's Bush envisioning "a foreign-handed foreign policy" or Miller skewering vociferous cultural conservatives like William Bennett and Lynne Cheney for their silence on Bush's particular "West Texas version of Ebonics." But there is also a strong undercurrent of outrage. Only because our elections have become so dependent on television and its emphatic emptiness, says Miller, could a man of such sublime and complacent ignorance assume the highest office in the land.

Read a newspaper or catch the news on television and you might get the impression that America's current leadership is "mainstream": perhaps a bit more conservative and in its foreign policy more belligerent than its predecessors, but still a federal authority that functions within America's political traditions. But as Mark Crispin Miller argues here with great clarity and effect, we are in fact living in a state that would appall the Founding Fathers: a state that is neither democratic nor republican, and no more "conservative" than it is liberal. He exposes the Bush Republicans' contempt...

Essays discuss television, the news media, television commercials, game shows, President Reagan, political campaigns, robots, and the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

A seminal work on how public opinion is created and shaped, Edward Bernays's 1923 classic Crystallizing Public Opinion set down the principles that corporations and government have used to influence public attitudes over the past century.

A primer on the then new profession of "public relations counsel," Crystallizing elucidates the "instruments and techniques" that PR professionals use to mold public opinion on behalf of their client's interests. By adapting the ideas that Bernays put forth in this book, governments and advertisers have been able to "regiment the mind like...