Rating: 
Summary: A Must-Read
Review: Miller's brilliant (if, yes, from-the-left) dissection of the President's manner of speech is ammo for those fighting Bush's supposedly compassionate fiscal and environmental policies, which target lower-income Americans and, in some ways, impoverish us all. If they can forgive some tart gibes from the author, truly humane conservatives who read this book may find themselves chilled by the way Bush's mind seems to work. As Miller argues, the President is far from stupid, and his troubles with the language should not be laughed off, as Bush himself now attempts to do. Rather, they should be seen as one way to ascertain what the man cares about-as opposed to what he claims to care about. As for the charge of elitism posted on this site, Miller's writing is lively and accessible to a general audience, though the writer is unapologetically intellectual. It's not elitist to value education over ignorance, thinking over thoughtlessness. What's elitist is putting someone in charge of a company or a country just because he's well-born (with the fundraising capacity that implies). And to those who took the time to post "reviews" saying they refuse to read the book: This kind of ignorance-on-purpose is what the country's ruling class is literally banking on.
Rating: 
Summary: Best When Discussing TV
Review: The world changed on September 11th, but our President didn't. This book talks about why. It's hard for a liberal to give a liberal 3 stars, but! There's a parade of Bush quotes and Miller's attempt to explain most of them in terms of Freudian slips. This becomes tiresome, and of course, when it comes to Bush there's always the suspicion that they are merely stupid slips and not Freudian ones. When, for instance, he uses the word "commiserate" instead of "commensurate", you just know he's barely aware of either word's definition. The quote section is sandwiched between lengthy diatribes wherein Miller shows us he's a bit too rabid to be helpful (don't preach to the choir, guy, reach out to the other side!). And it's obviously time to get ready for 2004, but Miller has no suggestions. Miller's at his best when he's exposing TV as the willing accomplice of the Right. Sounded correct to me anyway, especially his fingering of Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts. When points start getting too profound, they reach for the trivial. Lucky us.
Rating:
Summary: Great idea but not a great book
Review: The best parts of this book are the various quotes by Bush and transcripts of interviews that he gave. The book discusses how the media gave Bush a free pass during the presidential campaign. After the various presidental debates commentators talked about what a friendly guy Bush was and how stiff Gore was. They ignored the fact that Gore laid out his positions on the issues and Bush did not. The media also rarely challenged Bush's lack of intelligence. Other than that I didn't think this book was very interesting, which is a pity because Miller had a great premise. "The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill" is a much more engaging book. If you want do do a little pre-election reading on Bush I recommend that you pass on "The Bush Dyslexicon" and get Suskind's "The Price of Loyalty" instead.
Rating:
Summary: Don't misunderestimate this book!
Review: "What's not fine is, rarely is the question asked, are, is our children learning." - George W. Bush, Jan. 2000 Media critic Mark Crispin Miller has written a new book titled The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder. Although it brims with outrageous examples of Bush's inability to speak meaningful sentences (e.g., "Laura and I don't realize how bright our children is sometimes until we get an objective analysis."), this book is not so much about Bush's illiteracy as it is about how the corporate media cherishes him and his utter lack of ideas. Miller believes that Bush's problem is deeper than mere dyslexia, or what he calls Bush's "West Texas ebonics." It's deeper, too, than simple ignorance. Bush's problem is that he's an ANTI-intellectual, and thus he plays very well on television. Although an excellent advertising medium, television detests reasoned discourse and instead focuses attention on the visual and the trivial, such as Ross Perot's big ears, Al Gore's robotic gestures, or any woman's hair style. Writes Miller: "The networks' journalistic stars go on and on and on about the politicians' failure or success at pleasing--or at not displeasing--viewers. ...such interminable yakking tells us nothing, dwelling on details of bearing, posture, voice, and makeup, instead of dealing with what anybody did, said, or failed to say." Put another way, our TV culture reduces "all discussion to the level of the taste-test, wherein 'likeability' is all that counts." Thus, a smirking ignoramus who couldn't name any world leaders during his presidential campaign actually became a darling of the media, whose reporters and pundits continue to coddle him like a slow child, virtually never throwing him any curves nor attempting to pin him down with pointed or complex questions. In a typically wry passage, Miller observes: "Thus, Bush himself is a big-time beneficiary of what he likes to call 'the soft bigotry of low expectations.'" Particularly galling to Miller is the Right's attempt to spin Bush's ignorance as an indication that he's a man of the people, like an Andrew Jackson or an Abraham Lincoln. (Republican Representative J.C. Watts actually introduced Bush at a campaign rally in South Carolina by shouting proudly, "You don't have to be smart to be president!") Miller reminds us that Bush hardly dragged himself up from common conditions. Rather, he partied his way through school, squandering rich educational opportunities at Andover and Yale, two highly competitive institutions which never would have accepted him--much less graduated him--without his family's intercession. Accordingly, Miller dubs Bush the anti-Lincoln, "one who, instead of learning eagerly in humble circumstances, learned almost nothing at the finest institutions in the land." "And I see Bill Buckley is here tonight, fellow Yale man. We go way back, and we have a lot in common. Bill wrote a book at Yale--I read one." - George W Bush, Oct. 2000 Miller's book is nothing short of alarming, cataloguing as it does the anti-democratic collusion between the corporate media and the conservative politicians who support them. But Miller's wit is as keen as his powers of observation, so this book is as pleasurable as it is disturbingly informative.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent read for liberals, conservatives, those inbetween
Review: The Bush Dyslexicon is a rousing attack on Bush's ability to lead America - a charge based on the President's ignorance on issues unimportant to him and his benefactors as well as his inability to either speak or think in a complex manner. Liberals eager to see modern Republican conservatism thrown to the wolves will enjoy seeing Bush's flagrant violations of English grammar and syntax dissected and beautifully deconstructed. Equally of interest is the idea of the mass media's movement to the right, and Miller's frequent examples of the interplay between media and politics in our previous election. Most interesting was the notion that Bush sought the Presidency in order to restore the Bush family's image - the image soiled by the "wimp factor" as well as losing to the likes of Bill Clinton. The book seems to conclude that even despite the "right" lean of the media, W. can't help but be remembered as one of the worst Presidents in US history - a position carefully crafted through an interweaving array of arguments that fairly depict the President as an uneducated, arrogant child of old money. Republicans, seemingly dissed by the book's name as well as a humorous picture of Dubya on the front cover, should find this book of interest as well. The attacks on Bush completely disregard anything positive the President has done, and even throws away the President's religious practices as political posturing. Such revitalized, fresh attacks on the President in the aftermath of the result of the 2000 election are only a glimpse of things to come, as the left gradually grows more and more disenchanted with the President's strongarm tactics. Just imagine if Bush got re-elected...any Republican interested in reading a manifesto deep from "the other side" will enjoy this. As for me, I am politically somewhere in the middle, but thoroughly enjoyed Miller's "crisp", freely-flowing writing style that made the book easy to finish in only a short time. Very informative, very succinct, very well written...I highly recommend it to anyone who has even the vaguest interest in American politics - from either side.
Rating: 
Summary: Read this in October 2004
Review: I confess I may not have purchased this book if I didn't recognize the author's name. Mark Crispin Miller was a film professor at a Baltimore university when I was an undergrad well over a decade ago. I enrolled in his lecture course and he helped make Stanley Kubrick a little less inscrutable, so I figured I'd give him a chance to deconstruct George W. Bush as well. The "Dyslexicon" is three books in one. The center book, of course, is a lengthy compendium of the unelected President's misquotes. They're helpfully indexed by political issue. There are all your old favorites ("Families is where... wings take dream"). There are several quotes from Bush's own campaign autobiography ("A Charge To Keep") which doesn't sound as if it was written by Bush at all. Since the book contradicts his own views on turmoil at Yale in the late '60s, he probably didn't. Most important, I think, are the lengthy passages from the three debates with Al Gore in late 2000 that probably won Bush the election (or rather, put him in a position to get selected by the Supreme Court). For example, seeing in print how Gore dismantles Bush on issues such as affirmative action still had me scratching my head, just as I scratched my head in 2000 when the media declared that Bush "won" the debates. The quotes, as I said, are the core of the book. Around that is a lengthy media-science discourse on television news and how America as a nation selects their presidents. This part of the book is a polemic, highly political, and I confess that I wasn't 100% on board with Miller's arguments. However, his case is compellingly stated. The point of publishing a book like this is to raise issues and engage discourse. On that level it is a far higher quality of discussion than you would see from, say, Regnery Press, which is the preferred platform for those who spread Bushisms. The final portion of the revised book is the post-9/11 material. This book came out shortly after Bush was inaugurated, but was updated rather sensibly to show the changing focus of Bush's administration and policies. Miller deals well with the canonization of Bush after the tragedy, as spun by Ari Fleischer and Karl Rove. Less successful is his final argument, presented on pages 325-332 as "The Reason Why". First of all, you don't want to go around quoting Noam Chomsky to explain why 9/11 happened. There is a middle ground between the Chomsky and Bush views as to why America was selected for attack, but Miller doesn't stake it out. Are these the opinions Miller would have endorsed had Al Gore been President in 2001? In the end, though, Miller does an important job dissecting Bush's policies. America was sold a bill of goods, electing the most radical President in a century, believing him to be a centrist. Miller presents his unvarnished words, which are at turns laugh-out-loud funny, and deeply disturbing. The middle book is the one you need to own, and the supporting essays are worth considering as well.
Rating:
Summary: This book explains a lot.
Review: I read recently about a Houston high school student with a B average who, enrolling at the University of Houston, could not make it through her freshman year because the courses were too difficult. She dropped out and entered a trade school. I also read recently that the two states in the country that have the lowest requirement for proficiency on state tests are Colorado and Texas. To be considered proficient in those states a student need only achieve a reading score in the 13th percentile. That's the bottom thirteen percent. I don't know what happened in Colorado, but I have a pretty good idea about Texas. The state tests in Texas were first administered to Governor Bush and continually dumbed down until the test writers came up with a version the guv was able to pass. That's the one that's used to test Texas students.
Rating:
Summary: Let BUSH tell you who he REALLY is--in his own words.
Review: Read this book and find out, in plain English, (something Bush and his handlers seem incapable of offering) exactly WHO the man is who now sits in the White House. Want to know what George W. believes in, endorses, thinks?
Let him tell you himself; his quotes fill this book. Warning: You may not like what you learn.
Rating:
Summary: Laughing til it Hurts
Review: Well, it really isn't funny that our democracy has been subverted, but (somehow) there are still plenty of laughs in this book. Until the final chapter, that is; there Mr. Miller clearly spells out what has happened to our country, and only someone who hates democracy would find much funny there. This book (and especially the thoughtful and provoking last chapter) should be read by everyone who believes in our Constitution and democracy.
Rating:
Summary: Mean Book About a Dumb Guy
Review: This book is certainly more than it seems, and is far more than just a lampoon of George W. Bush's voluminous offerings of gaffes, malapropisms, inconsistencies, incoherencies, and outright bald-faced lies. Miller builds upon such presidential illiteracy to make much larger points about the way power is constructed in the modern American system. This is the focus of the introduction and conclusion of the book, which surround an extremely repetitive parade of Bushisms that merely illustrate Miller's points through sheer volume, rather than analysis. Meanwhile, Miller's larger tenets about the state of American democracy sometimes materialize, but often don't. I agree with most of Miller's basic positions, as we currently have a president who is far from qualified for the job, got a free ride from his family and its bootlickers his entire life, has no independent thoughts, makes all decisions based on the whims of the rich and powerful, epitomizes the deep resentment and bubbling hatred of the slipping privileged class, and wasn't even truly elected. The fact that such an unintelligent and unqualified person was placed into power by money and vested interests and used as a figurehead, all the while enjoying a non-critical sunny treatment from the corporate media, should make all of us extremely concerned about the state of American democracy and the directions in which our country is headed. Miller utilizes Dubya's illiteracy and lack of skill in order to illustrate this larger thesis, and his argument makes perfect sense. The problem with this book is that Miller keeps drifting away from his main points and goes off on many mean-spirited tirades about the entire American system in general, and electoral history back to mid-century. I happen to agree with the bulk of Miller's polemics, but they would be more helpful in a book that was meant to be a call to arms. Unfortunately they tend to sink this book that comes very close to groundbreaking socio-political points, but doesn't quite get there. [~doomsdayer520~]
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