My friend Randy discussed with me, one evening down in Santa Cruz, my thoughts about the need for a liberal "rapid response system" to right-wing publications. As I said to him, we need to be able to respond -- REALLY respond -- quickly and powerfully whenever a book by Coulter or Hannity or any of the many others appears. Right now, there are a lot of liberal books on the market ... they appear with some regularity. But most of them are, quite frankly, TOO good. Take Eric Alterman's book, "What Liberal Media?" Took that guy years to write it. It's long and elegantly written and ever-so-reasonable and jam-packed with facts and arguments. Hundreds of detailed footnotes, and if you follow them you'll find they lead to the actual citations, and those citations are genuinely relevant.

A lot of people will read his book. They will be, almost all of them, committed liberals and progressives of various sorts (or, a few, confirmed right-wingers looking to "know the enemy" and seek flaws). Most will be very well educated people.  Almost nobody will actually have his or her mind changed by Alterman, because almost all of them will already agree or be steadfast in their opposition. Maybe a few members of the media itself will read it and cringe, but I rather doubt it. Its impact, if any, will radiate outward mostly under the surface, subtle and over time.

I'm really, really glad he wrote his book. I'm glad for all such books: Sidney Blumenthal's and Greg Palast's and all the rest. (Well, Palast really IS a hard-fightin' guy. The local bookstore has his latest, and I want a copy ... I'm going to cart over some books tomorrow in order to do a bit of bartering.) But the truth is, they never reach people who don't already read such things. They only appeal to well-educated and thoughtful folks. They are not written, mostly, for the masses. And they are rarely timely in any meaningful sense: they are always months or years late.

So this is what I discussed with Randy, and I touched on this, and also on what I think is needed: some kind of liberal publishing house that is well-funded and is NOT obligated to actually make money, or even break even (though if it does either, it would be more than happy about the matter). This publishing house would have a number of projects. One would be "instant battle books," rapidly-written and distributed HARD-HITTING replies to each and EVERY rightwing assault. So when Anne Coulter's "Slander" appeared, this publishing house would have had out in just a few weeks a book called "Libel: How Anne Coulter Lies About Liberals."

These wouldn't be models of brilliant, academically-solid liberal tomes. They would be quickly written and hard-hitting. They would be thin books -- only a 200 pages, maybe even less. They would have low cover prices, and in fact would often be given away. The writers and contributors would be paid decent wages for their work, nothing more (but enough to help incubate and develop promising new liberal talent). They would be as accurate as possible, but not complex and academic: they would speak to the average person, in terms the average person understands.

They would not only confront and debunk the right-wing glop of Anne Coulter or Sean Hannity or whoever, they would also EDUCATE people about what liberalism really is. They would ALWAYS have -- scattered about in them -- simple, clean explanations of liberal ideology, and how it brings home the bacon for people in the form of opportunity and hope. So these books would be positioned to play offensive as well as defensive.

My immediate reaction was to wonder if perhaps the tremendous insights and research abilities of the various liberal bloggers and pundits could be utilized for such a project. And Roger agreed, writing:

Yeah, we COULD try to assemble them all (and some of the better-known liberal writers too, like Alterman, Marshall, etc.). Initially no money, but if they could secure reprint rights for pieces they write for The Nation, New Republic, Washington Monthly, etc., and donate them, then they'd be able to contribute too.

But take Coulter's book. Suppose we'd parceled it out to 20 or so bloggers, each charged with thoroughly vetting one chapter or one-half of a chapter, including all footnotes. And then, each person was to write a "reply" just to that section. Blow by blow, demolish it. Show how it was full of lies, mis-representations, stupidities. Now I grant you the tone would be terribly uneven, the style would shift constantly throughout our tome, and the editor would have a fairly large task of weaving it together. Plus, the editor (or a more select subgroup of the contributors) would have the task of adding material for our offense: arguments not just against what Coulter wrote, but in FAVOR of liberalism. (The introduction or afterword could contain a "simplified explanation of what liberalism is," ideally along the lines of my understanding of it as the social-political expression of the scientific method coupled with a humanistic value system).

We'd be busy doing this, let me tell you, and it would be appropriate for me or someone to start cranking out grant proposals in order to scavenge up some cash to pay the editor and -- ideally -- provide a little pay to the contributors, too. More importantly, eBooks are all fine and good, but they STILL lack the ability to penetrate any market that is not already interested to some extent. Our anti-Coulter book, in the example above, would be useful -- truly useful -- ONLY if it were then printed in an inexpensive form and mass distributed: zillions of copies, ideally with enough sold in bulk at dirt-cheap prices to liberal and political groups so that a lot of them could be simply given away. But that does mean some deep-pocketed benefactor has got to say, "Okay, here's the cash for the publishing end, anyhow." (You'd be amazed how cheaply you can print pulp paperbacks, of course. One non-profit I know of, a group that helps homeless kids turn away from street life, prostitition and drugs, sticks a little paperback in some of its special appeal mailings. 60 or 80 pages, as I recall, with perfect-binding (basically, like any paperback novel you'll ever see) and a monochrome-printed cover. It MUST be cheap for them to do it).

Anyhow, there was more to my idea, but I gave you the first presentation.

As Roger correctly points out, funding is the key, since there's no guarantee that this kind of project would bring in a lot of profit. We'd need a George Soros who wouldn't mind giving up a little pocket money in the cause of balancing the scales, or a publishing house willing to take the chance on a loss for good reason. (Which brings up a question, does Regnery actually make any money on the right-wing crap they publish?)

Anyone with comments or ideas about how to move such a project forward, please drop me a note and I'll put up anything interesting on the site.

BTW, at some point when he's got some more free time on his hands, I'll try to get Roger to expound a little on his ideas about the relationship between liberalism and the scientific method.