Rosie O’Donnell Announces Book Club

Upset by what she calls “the dumbing down of America” by Oprah Winfrey’s book club, The View hostess Rosie O’Donnell today announced that she is launching her own book club called “Books Every American Should Read.”

“I just think that Oprah is doing a disservice, that’s all.” Rosie explained. “It’s important, especially in today’s political climate, that we not let some jingoistic sycophant like Oprah Winfrey try to set the national dialogue on literature. Her latest selection, The Road, takes place totally inside the United States. Oprah, listen to me: the whole world is not about America!”

For her first choice, Rosie has chosen to highlight an obscure late 19th-century scholarly text called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Rosie said that her reasons for choosing it were very simple.

“This is an important piece of knowledge about history and the development of the world as we know it that the government and the so-called free press just don’t want you to read.” She said. “Everybody in the world knows what’s going on except for we Americans because of this massive conspiracy to keep the truth from us. How can you read serious, scholarly works like Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace not Apartheid or the recent report out of Harvard and Chicago Universities, The Israel Lobby, unless you have this piece of historical background? It would be like trying to run the country without reading the constitution. You know, like George Bush has been doing!”

Asked about what future choices she might make for the book club, Rosie gave some hints about what she was considering next. “Americans just don’t understand about other cultures, so I’m thinking of a serious cultural study like The Resistance Manifesto by investigative reporter John Conner, or maybe highlighting a leading foreign intellectual who has studied America, like Noam Chomsky in his book Failed States.”

When told that Chomsky was an American, Rosie shrugged. “He’s got a foreign-sounding name and he hates the United States, which is good enough for me. At least he’s not contaminated by the right-wing groupthink that infects places like CNN and CNBC.”