http://www.amazon.com/Killing-Lincoln-Shocking-Assassination-Changed/dp/0805093079/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1321327602&sr=8-1Twitter has been...well, atwitter....about the mess of a book that Billo "wrote" about Lincoln. So I decided to go to Amazon (link above) to take a look at how it is being received in the Amazon community. There are already over 1100 reviews on Amazon, and a remarkable 2 star average (even Bush and Cheney's books seem to creep to 3 stars due to all of the freep review). If you read through the reviews, you get hundreds of appropriately disparaging remarks about all of the historical inaccuracies, lack of footnotes....from people that expect a historical work to be....well, historical (and accurate).
But you look at the few 4 or 5 star reviews, and you get the key insight. Followers of Faux, followers of Billo, do NOT want facts. They want either "a good story", or, most depressing, you get the "if this book reports it, it must be true". My favorites - "now this is interesting history - if they taught this in school, it would be a lot more interesting" types of reviews.
And presto - this is the audience that is drawn to Faux....or, is it the audience that Faux creates? Whichever it is, it is just a shadow of one of the most significant problems in this country - the total disregard for truth, facts, and distrust of intellect.