I have always known Mark Crispin Miller as a man of many words, mostly well chosen and clearly expressed. He is someone who has taught writing, is an author, a professor at NYU and also an articulate media activist who runs the Project On Media Ownership. He is one smart fellow. And did I tell you that he still sings rock and roll on the side? And, besides all that, retains a sense of humor.

He is a model PRM–Post Renaissance Man.

But I wondered about just why he would be so taken with George W Bush’s mutilation of the English language to bother writing a book about it. After all, everyone makes fun of him for the way be jumbles his words, including himself. What more is there to say?

For years people have been sending me amusing joke books about bloopers and linguistic screw-ups by an assortment of pathetic Presidents and celebrities, people who have twisted language and ideas to their own uses, and, in the process, provided grist for endless jokemeisters on TV, newspaper cartoonists, and Saturday Night Live sketches.

Do we really need a definitive collection of droppings from Dubya’s disorder? Of course, we don’t. Lists of his many gaffes and blunders, or so-called malopropisms, can found on many a web site. Only Mark Miller isn’t laughing so much as pointing out that the laugh is on us, especially many of us in the media who have found it so amusing that we miss what’s really going on behind the mask and the curtain.

Miller’s The Bush Dyslexicon (Norton Books) is a major book about a minor problem that he turns into a window into much more frightening reality.

“The Bush Dyslexicon is meant to set the record straight:” he writes, “to remind us of the truth that TV shows us even as it keeps on lying about it — much like the President himself, who unless he knows his script by heart, tells the truth despite himself and does it most transparently when he is lying.”

Dissect that sentence why don’t you. And when you do, you will find an argument of some nuance and subtly that brings us through Bush as Clown to the machine that he used so well to amplify his bumbling voice and manufactured image. “The head that drives the body forward is, of course, the media machine — the busy neural network of producers, editors, anchors, journalists and pundits, all subtly guided by the propagandists of the right.”

I don’t want to give his whole argument away because it is a joy to read, in part because of his deft use of language to decode language. It is the work of a clever and committed teacher/public intellectual who knows how to read the grammar and hidden subtexts that the mighty media machine produces.

Mark Crispin Miller’s book is getting some attention in the mainstream media of a welcome and not so welcome type.

If you can believe, the book that shows how the joke (Bush as a Joke and the Joke of Bush) is on us rocketed to some attention on the strength of a rave review in Entertainment Weekly. That in itself is a delicious irony because of Miller’s frequent attacks on the seamless infiltration of entertainment values into the whole culture. (I couldn’t get much air time for my own attack on the merger of news biz and show biz some years ago except — don’t you love it — on CNN’s Show Biz Today.) Its no surprise that the hard right is now on his case, working covertly to undercut the book’s appeal.

Miller told me what’s been happening “The Freeper network (A reference to the hard core Republicans who use the Free Republic site as their on line clubhouse) has begun to blitz the Amazon site with highly negative reviews. Although they obviously haven’t read the book, they seem to feel that it’s their patriotic duty to attack it. Thus they’ve managed to lower its overall rating, which was five stars as long as it was based on folks’legitimate responses.”

“This actually started as soon as I’d appear on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal,” going head to head with Brent Bozell. This set the cyber-goons in motion, blasting the DYSLEXICON with canned slams that bear no relation what’s really in the book.”

Its time for those of us who resent this type of intellectual vigilantism to strike back in three ways: l) Read the book yourself. 2) Tell others about it, and 3) Write your own reviews for Amazon and similar sites.

You will be glad when and if you follow up on these suggestions. Let me know what you think.

And to paraphrase the BIG MAN himself: don’t “Misunderestimate” the power of words — theirs and ours.