Pirate's Cove

No, this isn’t a non-fiction book, but the paranoid ravings of what Liberals think might happen if, God some nebulous social justice deity who probably isn’t real anyhow forbid, McCain-Palin had won in 2008. Ace was all over this yesterday, with three posts on the subject. People were making fun of the book on Twitter. Here’s how it goes on Amazon

“They said what they would do, and we did not listen. Then they did what they said they would do.”

So ends the first chapter of this brilliantly readable counterfactual novel, reminding us that America’s Christian fundamentalists have been consistently clear about their vision for a “Christian Nation” and dead serious about acquiring the political power to achieve it. When President McCain dies and Sarah Palin becomes president, the reader, along with the nation, stumbles down a terrifyingly credible path toward theocracy, realizing too late that the Christian right meant precisely what it said.

In the spirit of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, one of America’s foremost lawyers lays out in chilling detail what such a future might look like: constitutional protections dismantled; all aspects of life dominated by an authoritarian law called “The Blessing,” enforced by a totally integrated digital world known as the “Purity Web.” Readers will find themselves haunted by the questions the narrator struggles to answer in this fictional memoir: “What happened, why did it happen, how could it have happened?”

Obviously, many lefties are orgasming over this book, per the reviews on the page

• “The scariest thing about Christian Nation is that it’s so plausible. No violent revolution, no blood in the streets, is necessary for Americans to lose their freedoms—just a failure to defend the liberties that we often take for granted.” (the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director, Americans United for Separation of Church and State)
• “This riveting novel should join Sinclair Lewis’s It Can Happen Here as an American classic…Please, read this book and then pass it on to six other people, making it into a chain letter for liberty.” (Nadine Strossen, former president, American Civil Liberties Union)
• “Rich’s Christian Nation is more than a ‘what if’—as the ‘theocratic program’ unfolds our usual ‘So what?’ regarding fundamentalism of any variety becomes the real danger. Pay attention. What’s at stake is the heart and soul of American democracy.” (Rev. Dr. James A. Kowalski, dean, The Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine)

USA Today has another take

‘Christian Nation’ falls flat, despite milking liberal fears

….

It’s not a comedy. It is an earnest, heavily researched warning about what Rich sees as the real-life threat to democracy and tolerance posed by the religious right.

That means it will be judged less on literary merit than political leanings. If there was ever a blue-state novel, this is it.

Intentionally or not, those last two lines hit at the crux of the matter: the book is heavy on pushing politics and short on entertainment. I have no problem with Liberals engaging in these types of fantasies, no matter how utterly far-fetched they are. Conservatives/Libertarians certainly publish books that engage in the same type of “what if” speculation. I generally avoid the heavily political fiction books (I don’t mind a bit of politics, but, keep it simple), but there are two I’ve read in the last year or so, An Act Of Self Defense by Erne Lewis and In Due Time by J.K. Jones, that are spectacular. The first is about the need for term limits in a State that is increasingly tyrannical. The latter is actually a time travel book that mixes in what would happen if the US becomes super Progressive. The difference here is that both those books understand the cardinal rule: Entertainment First. I’ve started a few that did not understand this, and put them away.

Lefties do not seem to understand that entertainment must come first. That’s why their talk radio fails, while Hannity, Rush, Boortz before he retired, etc had/have large audiences for long periods of time. This is why liberal movies keep failing. Who wants to pay for this stuff? Not even liberals. The last movie, and one of the only successful ones, was Fahrenheit 911. Since then there’s been a string of political heavy liberal movies that flop. Heck, even some movies that are light on liberalism have failed this summer.

Quite frankly, it sounds really, really dull. And preachy. Lefties will eat this up, but, then, they are gluttons for punishment. And prefer to be miserable. So, the book should help them out with that misery. Plus their paranoid fantasies of a coming Christian Theocracy. But, hey, don’t mention the notion that Islamists are actually working to take over the world and install their hard line version of Islam, because that would be silly. Even though they tell us this in the real world.

More: one thing I wanted to mention was another book that tried to go down a mega-liberal consiracy/fantasy/moonbat paranoid fantasy, namely The Shell Game by Steve Alten. Alten has written some excellent scifi books, such as the Meg serious, The Loch (a very good and even realistic look at the Loch Ness Monster), and others. But, Shell Game was horrible. Because it was so overtly over the top leftists, focusing on politics rather than entertainment.