50 REASONS NOT TO VOTE FOR BUSH EDITED BY ROBERT STERLING ...

S NOT TO VOTE FOR BUSH

EDITED BY ROBERT STERLING WITH GREG PALAST ET AL.

FERAL HOUSE, 208 PAGES, $9.95

THOUGH AVOWEDLY non-partisan, Feral House has put out an awful lot of political books this past year. For the most part they haven't been wild-eyed conspiracy theories or black-bloc anarchist critiques that imagine a world without capitalism as an unending Enya song. They've tended to be well-researched exposes like Inside the Shadow Government (a frank look at the federal "continuity of government" plans) and a reprint of General Smedley D. Butler's classic War Is a Racket.

The most recent addition to the Feral frontlist list is Robert Sterling's 50 Reasons Not to Vote for Bush, a look at how Bush and his team have instituted a rule-by-corporations-and-disinformation government that allows their buddies to plunder and rob the public and small investors like the Pirates of the Caribbean Offshore Bank. Dubya is presented here as a hypocrite who, though he's probably snorted more snow than an asthmatic caught in an avalanche, so earnestly espouses a clean-scrubbed just-say-no society that you'd think he was wearing Nancy Reagan's underwear. He's also a psychopath who giggles about executing criminals like a little girl with a balloon full of amyl nitrate. And, lest we forget (as Al Gore seems to), he and Jeb and Katherine Harris screwed 57,000 African Americans in Florida out of their right to vote.

All true. But Sterling doesn't seem to include what, in my mind, is the most important reason to give John Hinckley a weekend pass, an Uzi and a copy of The Silence of the Lambs on his choice of VHS or DVD: Bush is a born-again Christian who thinks he's on a mission from God to kick start the battle of Armageddon.

Sterling's concise handbook of facts, figures and felonies, enlivened by his sardonic (some would say "demented") wit, is rounded out by pieces from such fine folks as former Realist editor and New York Press columnist Paul Krassner, postapocalyptic Renaissance woman/goth goddess Lydia Lunch and Matt Taibbi (another New York Press columnist), who does a pretty good job questioning the credibility of the United States' corporate-owned press.

Though it probably won't get read by the vast majority of Midwestern swing voters, 50 Reasons might just get a few of their offspring away from wanking to SuicideGirls in their basements and into the voting booth, or even behind the Billionaires for Bush banner at the Republican National Convention.

KEN MONDSCHEIN