The antidote to email forwards from your uncle.

Conservatives have been getting their news from clowns for years. But something changed in 2009.

From 2001 till the end of January 2009, the conservative movement held the White House for eight years and the Congress for six. And by the end of Bush’s second term it was evident that the GOP had failed in nearly every imaginable way*.

Some speculated it would be decades before anyone but the reddest states let them run anything larger than a circus.

In The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine by David Brock, Ari Rabin-Havt and Media Matters for America we learn how Fox News’ chief Roger Ailes seized a perfect moment to exploit his lifetime of experience in television and politics. Ailes and his underlings, sympathetic to (or synonymous with) the Republican Party, used Fox News to actively rebuild and rebrand the GOP. Under the guise of fair and balanced reporting, they directly promoted and manufactured what most people know as the Tea Party movement.

(If you don’t think the mainstream Tea Party is a Fox creation, tell me what’s happened to them since March of 2010 when Fox News was told to stop promoting Tea Party events. It’s basically email lists and hashtags.)

The Fox Effect is the first entry in the LOL Book Club. I invite you to read it with me. Comment here. Or tweet me at @LOLGOP. I’ll keep you updated with where I’m at (currently page 132) and comment on what I’m getting out of it.

When we’re done with it we’ll move on to Rachel Maddow’s Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power.

From there, we pick some more smart books like:

Lizz Free or Die: Essays by Lizz Winstead

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy by Chris Hayes

Think of it as a way to improve the political conversation while supporting LOLGOP and Eclectablog. For if you click on any of the links on this page and buy the book or anything at Amazon, we’ll get a portion of the proceeds to keep the blog and tweets going. We can’t do it without you.

Reading whole books. It’s what makes progressives different.

*Some argue the goal of the Bush Administration was to overextend our military, destabilize the Middle East and destroy 15 million jobs. I do believe there was an intentional spending of the surplus and a growth in spending designed to “Starve the Beast”. But the idea that anyone could have failed as miserably as George W. Bush purposely is inconceivable. Conservatives want and need power, which is why Roger Ailes and Fox News is so crucial to them. Electoral losses only make them more powerful.

[CC image by Sue Peacock]