Partisanship Goes Retail: Book Store Slaps Conservative Hands

Rough political partisanship, having now officially supplanted baseball as America's favorite pastime, has raised its feral literary head and, like the pixilated elephant who walked through the wrong door and wound up in a donkey show, is making an obscene ass of itself.

True Compass by Edward M. Kennedy is getting the treatment usually associated with Karl Rove in his Nixon dirty tricks days, and a book store has had to lay down the law and order:

"CONSERVATIVES! PLEASE STOP FLIPPING OVER AND DEFACING THE BOOKS ABOUT LIBERAL POLITICIANS. THIS BOOKSHELF IS NOT YOUR BLOG"

Now, lest Conservative readers of Book Patrol have a cow, it should be pointed out that Liberals, apparently, are also candidates for a semester or two in after-school detention.

From the Comments thread that unspooled from the original story's bobbin:

"In my neighborhood (suburb of Philly) there were countless acts of vandalism on homes that had McCain posters out front. Not only were they constantly stolen and defaced, the houses were too. At one point, one of my neighbors had to literally drill the metal poster into one of their trees about 20 feet in the air. Apparently too inaccessible for your average effete liberal, that remained, and still remains, unscathed."

"The houses were stolen? What trailer park was this with the McCain posters out front?"

"Because they're either trailer parks or mansions right? either racist or greedy, either rednecks or evil wall street businessmen. there's really nothing like the intolerance of liberals to turn one to the right."

"So you assume those McCain signs were attacked by 'liberals'? Why? I also live in a burb of Philly. I've seen all sorts of yard signs ripped out and tossed around. A coupla drunk teenagers wandering the streets of Springfield will vandalize any target that presents itself. Your assumption that it was liberals attacking the signs is misplaced."

What about those copies of Glenn Beck's book that have had the dust jackets Photshopped so that Beck is seen with a sock stuffed in his mouth?

(I can dream, can't I?)

But in the meantime, it's mano a mano on the bookshelves.



When the steam ceases to exit ears and flames on tongues extinguish, what these books have in common is a partisan view so over the top that it falls into burlesque comedy: loud, brassy, crude, sophomoric - and fun. But burlesque is best enjoyed in small doses. Alas, the ol' hook is not available to yank the yoyos off the stage.

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