Diary of a Wimpy pResident

Memo to the lazy cunts at Crown Publishing:

If you buy sight unseen anything from a Republican, especially by George W. Bush, don't be as lazy as him and assume that he's done all his homework, especially if you're paying him a small mint for it.

Because it's come to light that George W. Bush's Decision Points, which just knocked off the ironically-titled Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Ugly Truth as Amazon's top seller, is rife with passages already written and published by Bush's aides. And he did so without any attribution whatsoever. Says Ryan Grim at HuffPo:

Crown also got a mash-up of worn-out anecdotes from previously published memoirs written by his subordinates, from which Bush lifts quotes word for word, passing them off as his own recollections. He took equal license in lifting from nonfiction books about his presidency or newspaper or magazine articles from the time. Far from shedding light on how the president approached the crucial "decision points" of his presidency, the clip jobs illuminate something shallower and less surprising about Bush's character: He's too lazy to write his own memoir.

Bush's advance, by the way, for this copy-and-paste job was reported to be a cool $7,000,000, which is what another right wing zombie got for her ghost-written memoirs. Which segues neatly into my next point:

Of course, the fact that Bush couldn't write much less read a book by himself went without saying. We've known since at least March of this year that the memoir would be ghost-written, as was Sarah Palin's, by a 28 year-old Bush speechwriter named Christopher Michel. So when we start railing about the plagiarism, start with Michel.

This memo also goes out to whatever dingbat literary agent who thought that tying his or her fortunes to a Typhoid Mary like Bush was a good idea: If you were also tricked into thinking that this memoir would be the real deal, then you're as brain-dead as your colleagues. If you knew that this book would be ghost-written and plagiarized from Bush's aides, then you're a douchebag of the highest order and ought to donate your 15% of that 7 million to Bush's victims, starting with the widows, widowers and children of the servicepeople who'd needlessly died for Bush and Halliburton.

So, bottom line, GOP zombies keep getting $7,000,000 advances for books they're not even writing while I continue to get form rejection letters from literary agents for good manuscripts that I wrote myself that they refuse to read because I'm not, apparently, as marketable as Joe the Plumber.

Two years ago, Erica Heller, daughter of the late great Joseph Heller, more eloquently than I put this disturbing trend of throwing mountains of money at the cloven hoofs of right wing mouth breathers while real writers often get short shrift, especially if they're not "names."

Despite my obvious literary talent, I don't have to be eloquent about it nor do I feel the need to be any more than I have to keep silent about my neverending and ongoing frustration with avaricious, self-absorbed literary agents who are slowly killing the publishing business. Which is to say our nation's literary IQ by drying up the pool for the rest of us by letting the elephants suck up all the water so the rest of us have to slug it out for pennies with broken pool cues and beer bottles.

God damn you literary agents and God damn you publishers past and present who made them indispensable 30 years ago and making it impossible for people of real talent to even get their foot in the door of publishers on their own merits.

And this latest scandal over Bush's ghost-written pack of lies and denials only shows that if you kill enough people and are infamous enough for a whole host of war crimes, there will always be a scumbag literary agent who will gladly represent you whether or not they know or care that hardly a word in your property is true or even original.