That's the verdict at the Daily Caller and Fox News , both of which have spotted evidence that CNN's self-regarding hairspray boy's melodramatically titled The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America isn't exactly selling like hotcakes. Despite Acosta's built-in soapbox for hawking the whole thing to the public, the book sports a mere #179 rating for all titles on Amazon.com. So now he's taken to doing desperate things

According to Fox News's Hannity:

CNN's White House Correspondent Jim Acosta posted multiple sections of his new book on social media Thursday afternoon; publishing key excerpts following his botched bookstore appearance outside the nation's capital. "From 'The Enemy of the People' — 'We weren't really human to them anymore. This was the climate of fear that Trump had created. In this environment, a Trump supporter could resort to violence, I reasoned. It had become a dangerous time in America,'" posted Acosta on social media.

The botched bookstore appearance, according to the Daily Caller, went like this:

Acosta showed up Wednesday to the Barnes & Noble in Arlington, Virginia, for an impromptu book signing. Acosta tweeted out pictures of himself at the "surprise signing" displaying a stack of books and himself signing one. An Arlington Barnes & Noble employee told The Daily Caller the signing was not a planned event, but Acosta had called the store in advance to alert them he would be coming. The employee told the Caller the signing consisted of Acosta standing behind a counter and signing books for about an hour. "It was kind of very quiet — he showed up and signed," she said. She said there were "no customers waiting for him to sign his book" — he simply appeared without an announcement. A manager at the Arlington Barnes & Noble told the Caller that the store sold "like 30-or-something" copies of Acosta's book while he was there. He said the store still has some of Acosta's books in stock.

So he's down to posting passages from it on Twitter to get the public to bite, and showing up unannounced at bookstores around the capital to get the momentum going. There's no evidence any of this has worked — Twitterers are joking that he signed books to himself. Hannity has noted that Acosta's CNN viewership in recent days is down 33% over the same period last year.

This points to two things going on.

First, Acosta's book is mainly about himself, and his egotistic behavior in the press room that he now markets as being About Trump. Remember this incident, where he couldn't stop interrupting other reporters? Here's what Michael Goodwin wrote:

He adopted a lecturing, I-know-best tone to declare that "they're hundreds and hundreds of miles away; that's not an invasion." Trump's response should not have been necessary: "Honestly, I think you should let me run the country, you run CNN." After more back-and-forth, he called Acosta "a rude, terrible person" and said "CNN should be ashamed of itself. That should have been enough — Acosta got the attention he wanted and got Trump's goat, giving his network video it could make hay out of for days. Besides, there were scores of other reporters raising their hands to be called on. But Acosta wouldn't give up the microphone and kept talking over Trump, trying to lob another grenade. The president, clearly angry now and stepping away from the podium as if he might bolt the room, pointed at him and said forcefully, "That's enough, that's enough. Put down the mic." Finally, Acosta sat down, then stood up to argue again, interrupting another reporter.

He eventually got his press pass yanked and then got CNN's pricey lawyers to find a left-wing judge to force them to give it back to them, something normal people wouldn't get such pamperings about.

It's the behavior of a spoiled crybaby who can't stop making the news about himself and who has all the money and corporate backing he needs to get what he wants. Enemy of the people? No, more like "puke of the people."

The other thing is that he's a lightweight.

That's not just the verdict of other members of the White House press corps, many of whom have told me this. Since I don't watch CNN, I wouldn't exactly know otherwise. But all I hear from them is that he's a preening, vacuous, entitled idiot in the press room and not at all popular with the more serious-minded reporters in the same room. Any wonder President Trump's press secretary, the now-departing Sarah Sanders, scrapped the weekly press briefings altogether? Who needs that? Why babysit Acosta?

It's also obvious enough even from the lefty perspective.

Seriously, if you were a true dyed-in-the-wool leftist, would you really want your hate-Trump book and all the time it takes to read it to be written by a lightweight like Acosta? Wouldn't you want something more substantial, something by a heavyweight of the left such as Sasha Abramsky or Ta-Nehisi Coates? As alien as their views may be to us, their books argue hard for the socialist agendas they believe in. They don't make their books about themselves. No wonder their work sells better than Acosta's.

All we see with Acosta's little book melodrama is a self-regarding blow-hard exposed.

Let's just put the signature banners above and below some of Acosta's tweets to get the full flavor:

Dear Diary:

From “The Enemy of the People” - ”We weren’t really human to them anymore. This was the climate of fear that Trump had created. In this environment, a Trump supporter could resort to violence, I reasoned. It had become a dangerous time in America.” https://t.co/yPy7wgQowb pic.twitter.com/FycuHm1bhP — Jim Acosta (@Acosta) June 13, 2019

Yours truly, Jim.

Had enough?

Image credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.