Our 'Over the Cliff' website: A resource for progressives coping with insane right-wingers
One of the reasons John and I are extremely proud of our new book, Over the Cliff: How Obama's Election Drove the American Right Insane, is that while we tried to make sure it was entertaining and amusing and insightful, we above all wanted it to be a resource for progressives in coping with the nonstop deluge of disinformation, lies, and smears that have been the stock in trade of movement conservatives in the past year and a half.
We especially conceived it as a resource for progressives who have to deal with friends, family members, and workmates who succumb to irrational siren song of movement conservatism and their nonstop shouting heads. We believe that, even after you're done reading it, you'll be able to turn to it over and over for information that puts their insanity in perspective.
This is embodied, we think, in official Over the Cliff website we've created for the book. Among other things, we'll post all the book-related information there, as well as posts reporting on continuing right-wing insanity.
But first and foremost, the site is the home of our complete documentation for the book. And as such, we think it will prove to be an incredibly useful resource for progressives.
Online documentation is an important innovation in itself, and one we readily embraced, rather then placing the Notes at the book's end -- because when the referenced material is also online, readers using online notes, unlike traditional notes, can click over and actually read the article in question themselves, to see if it is cited accurately.
We took this innovation a step further: Because so much of Over the Cliff is derived from video material, when you click on links to Crooks and Liars posts -- and there is a high percentage of them in our documentation -- you can actually watch them saying it. It provides a much richer and stronger context than the snippets we can provide in book form.
This is an exciting new chapter in the evolution of publishing, and we're proud to be in the forefront. Most of all, we're proud to have built such a resource for our fellow truth-tellers.
As Rick Perlstein put it in his blurb for the book:
John Amato and David Neiwert have produced a book that should stay on shelves for 50 years—long enough to remind us that at least some people understood the strange and vile energies consuming the social contract at the beginning of the third millenium. As a record of what is happening to American conservatism in the year 2010, Over the Cliff is unmatched.
