Books! Actual books!
"A rollicking ride of intellectual discovery and emotional growth... his comic timing never fails"
-- The Wall Street Journal
"Pulls you in like a good sports story"
-- The New York Times Book Review
"Endearingly frank... jubilant... lighthearted and fast-paced"
-- New York Newsday
"A surprisingly touching memoir"
-- Entertainment Weekly
"Snappy and informative"
-- Associated Press
"Effortlessly funny and informative... tender, human, and very wise... A must for anyone who loves Jeopardy!, or has ever seen it, or is breathing."
-- Joss Whedon, creator, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
"I haven't seen Jeopardy! since I was a kid, and yet I was charmed and amused by Bob Harris's fascinating and surprisingly suspenseful book. Through sheer force of personality, he takes this brainy TV show and makes it funny and easy to relate to."
-- Ira Glass, creator and host, This American Life
"A surprisingly intimate, entertaining book."
-- Orson Scott Card, 4-time Hugo Award winner, author of Ender's Game
"Funny, enlightening -- and just might help you win a million bucks on Jeopardy!"
-- A. J. Jacobs, author of The Know-It-All
"A masterful job of describing the feel of Jeopardy! in the heat of battle... I knew Bob was a great guy and a fantastic Jeopardy! player. Now I've found that he's also a wonderful writer. I think I'm starting to hate him."
-- Brad Rutter, top money-winner in Jeopardy! history
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“Revelatory... Harris's sly wit and infectious curiosity make understanding world chaos fascinating... witty, horrific, and necessary.”
— Boston Globe
"Brave... irreverent... charges into the thick of the globe's myriad simmering wars... hilariously relaxed."
— New York Observer
"Only Bob could make a user’s guide to our increasingly hostile world this absorbing, this breezy, and—ultimately—this hopeful.”
— Ken Jennings, author of Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs
“Fascinating, enlightening, and surprisingly: NOT TOTALLY DEPRESSING. A gimlet-eyed look at the world we endure that’s also suitable for enjoying with a gimlet.”
— John Hodgman, author of The Areas of My Expertise
and correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
"All three [presidential] candidates should read all three of these [recommended] books, but McCain gets first crack at Bob Harris's "Who Hates Whom“... a lighthearted overview of the insurrections and civil wars in the world today."
— Steven Pinker, author of The Stuff of Thought, in the New York Times Book Review
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Main  Antiwar.com
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Me and Harriet |
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Thursday, 13 October 2005 |
Several of you have asked for my take on the Harriet Miers
appointment. I am flattered by this, as it indicates that you are
starting to consider my opinion important on matters about which there
is no reason to believe I know anything.
Bwah-HAH-ha-ha-ha-haaa. My plans for creating a cult of personality,
enticing hundreds of you to join me in a remote colony with bribeable
law enforcement and numerous biting insects, drugging your meager
rations, and committing unspeakable acts upon the weakest of the group
for my personal pleasure are thus well underway. Excellent.
But back to Harriet Miers.
Actually, it's kinda the same thing in a way. I have spent my entire
adult life watching the nation I grew up believing in being
increasingly overrun by a lunatic cult which believes in things like an
"invisible hand" magically transforming millions of people acting
purely out of self-interest into an engine of responsible long-term societal planning.
Which, if you haven't yet noticed, is insane.
Bizarrely, members of the cult also somehow believe that as a nation America -- hundreds of millions of people who should
be thinking only of their own self-interest, because, hey, that's the
path to social justice -- somehow forms its foreign policy out of the
kindest altruism. And elected leaders, who have committed their lives
to the economics of self-interest and carry decades-long indisputable
records of consistently acting to advance their own agendas at public
expense, are shining beacons of Christian charity.
The "Christian" part, of course, is key. Because inside the cult,
Americanism = belief = Christianity = devotion to the cult. (No matter, of course, what
Christ himself might have said. "Blessed are the meek" hardly lives up
to one's fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, after all.) Inside
the cult, all crimes can be forgiven and hypocrisies
forgotten -- infidelities, drug addictions, sexual harassment, shady payoffs, support for the killing and torture of civilians, advocacy of genocide, absolute lies by the score, it
doesn't matter -- as long as the cult itself is not questioned. Disagreement,
however, is unAmerican, unChristian, and the only true sin.
If you're in the cult, what I just wrote made you want to scream and
call me names. If you're not in the cult, what I just wrote is (or
should be)
thuddingly obvious.
Harriet, as far as I can tell, is not only in the cult, but one of the people knocking on doors at 7 am with an armful of literature.
Her position on abortion or gay rights might be muddy, but her record
as a Bush crony and attorney for corporate criminals is unambiguous.
(Read here and here and here. There's a really nice roundup here.)
Bottom line: if Exxon thought there was oil in your trigeminal valve
and decided to slant-drill in from your shoulder blades, and you took
them to court, filing whatever legal papers might be required to say in
elegant Latin "oh holy f*ck get this thing out of me, for the love of God!" Harriet Miers
would be the kind of person sitting with Exxon at the defense table.
With a flag pin in her lapel, a Bible in her briefcase, and a smile of undeserved certainty.
On top of all that, the woman has said some deeply weird things in
defense of the Monkey King, things that make me question her sanity.
(Bush is the most brilliant man she has ever met? What island of
enchanted lesbians has she been trapped on all these years?)
Does that mean lefties should oppose her? That's a tactical question,
translating to: are the alternatives even worse? Well, yes. Very much
so. Harriet Miers seems not to be 100% committed to the cult's position on personal issues. Thus the screaming from the rest of the cult: the only true sin, of course, is disagreement.
If Miers doesn't break the tape, everyone from Priscilla Owens to Karla Homolka would be back in the race (or would if Karla wasn't Canadian). Shit, Robert Bork is
still running around. Somebody might clone Roger Taney. Anything
could happen.
But I'd say letting somebody like this onto the court without a fight is the worst alternative of all.
Reasonable people will disagree.
Unreasonable people will disagree in All Caps.
Me, I'll be out with my own cult, which is just as rational and
ethical. It's two islands down from the enchanted lesbians, across
from the small sandy spit with a tree on it which has been declared a
$200 billion tax haven, one up from the jetty that sells all the
illegal fireworks. I'll be covered in black market smart bombs and
hypnotized virgins, wearing a small flag on my lapel and waving a Bible
in the air and proclaiming the moral high ground.
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