Book review: _Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy_

My review of Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy by Peter Schweizer.

What is a book? It’s not merely ink and paper, what makes it a “book” is that it imparts information.

Schweizer could have written such a book. He could have called it “Do as I say (not as I do): profiles in media hypocrisy”. He could have profiled hypocritical media blowhards of all kinds, and put his investigative journalism skills to good use.

Instead, he chose to write a book which makes plain at first glance that it is hopelessly politically slanted. As such, the information in the book is immediately suspect. It’s like reading a book about the history of World War II that pretends the war started in 1941 when the US joined in, or an oil industry environmental report on Alaska that doesn’t mention that it’s a wildlife refuge: you immediately know that the credibility of the book is near zero because of its blatant bias.

Hence–and this is the key point–Schweizer’s book will only be read by those who already take it on faith that liberals are all hypocrites. They already (think they) know that Michael Moore employs only Aryans and that Al Franken strangles kittens. In short, nobody who actually reads this book will gain any knowledge from it; it will merely reaffirm that which they already know and believe.

Therefore this is a book, but at the same time it’s not a book; it has the form of a book, but even if every fact in it is accurate, it will impart no knowledge to anyone, trigger no discourse, contribute nothing to the sum total of human knowledge. Frankly, Schweizer could have just set up an Amazon payments ID and had right wingers send him money directly, and avoid wasting so much ink and paper.