WashPost Never Reviews Mark Levin Books, But Promotes Salon.com Editor's 'Ratf**cked'

June 19th, 2016 8:39 PM

Here’s one easy way to demonstrate a newspaper is liberal and has no intention of treating Tea Party conservatism seriously. The Washington Post has skipped doing any book review of the last three best-sellers over the last five years by radio host and constitutional law expert Mark Levin: Ameritopia, The Liberty Amendments, and Plunder and Deceit.

But they made space on Sunday for a 1710-word book review of a radical leftist book by David Daley, the editor in chief of hard-left Salon.com entitled Ratf**cked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America's Democracy. In summation: horrible Republicans “stole democracy” and impede the leftist agenda through corrupt gerrymandering schemes.

Daley argues Republican bosses like Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie “devised a way to take a tradition of dirty tricks – known to political insiders as “ratf**king” – to a whole new, unprecedented level. Flooding state races with a gold rush of dark money made possible by Citizens United, the Republicans reshaped state legislatures, where the power to redistrict is held.”

At least the Post’s reviewer, Princeton professor Julian Zelizer, threw a little shade at the idea that the Republican majorities in Congress are artificially manufactured. But he concluded, this is a book Democrats (that is, Washington Post subscribers) should read:

Predicting the political impact of reform is also a tricky business. During the 1970s, liberal Democrats blew open the congressional committee system that had been in place for much of the 20th century, only to later see conservative Republicans such as Newt Gingrich thrive.

What Daley makes clear is that ruthless partisan gerrymandering is not good for democracy and makes it that much more difficult to wrestle control of the House away from the GOP.

Democrats should read this book. Political parties still have to build their national power from the bottom up. Without the Democrats investing resources in the nitty-gritty of state politics, if Hillary Clinton is able to win the presidency in November, she will probably face a Republican House that is hell-bent on stopping her and unlikely to give her any significant domestic victories.

One wonders if the Post book-review team even opens the dust cover when the Mark Levin review copies arrive.

PS: The other notable book review on Sunday is nonfiction book critic (and former Outlook section editor) Carlos Lozada struggling with Islamic church-state reality in a book on Islamism by Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution:

In his illuminating new book, Islamic Exceptionalism — I can imagine a sly smile on the lips of whomever thought of that title — Hamid contends that Islam is unique among the world’s major religions, both in its obsession with wielding influence over government and in its resistance to the secularizing forces that religion in Western countries has experienced.