I ordered Al Franken's "Lies" book within minutes of hearing that Fox News was suing him for copyright infringement with regards to the title. The full name is "Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them) A fair and Balanced Look at the Right". Fox claimed that "Fair and Balanced" was their trademark. Anyone who has watched Fox News would know they have a specific point of view, whether or not you would describe it as fascist white corporate world domination. I felt compelled to use the marketplace to let Fox know I didn't buy into their Nazi utopia. Lies opens with critiques of Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, and Sean Hannity. A lot of the O'Reilly material was familiar if you happened to catch CSPAN's coverage of BookExpo America, featuring a panel discussion with Molly Ivans, Al Franken, and Bill O'Reilly. I did catch it as a matter of random chance, and after some civil discussion, O'Reilly just started screaming at everyone telling them to shut up. I'm beginning to suspect that mal-adjusted children grow up to be conservative talk show hosts. Franken also discusses the unbalanced views presented on Fox New's Hannity and Colmes. What amazed me was a table reprinted from Sean Hannity's "Let Freedom Ring" which showed the percentage difference in requested budgets from the Reagan Whitehouse and actual budgets passed by the (Democratically controlled) Congress. On average the differences were 2.8%. But Hannity shows an additional column showing a "cumulative difference" which summed the percentage from each year, totally 24.5%. Mathematically this value is completely meaningless, because the basis for each percentage calculation is different. But Hannity goes on to use this value to make a calculation claiming the budget would be 24.5% smaller without Congress increasing the budget. I located the original table at www.presidentreagan.info/reagan_budgets.cfm. Certainly increasing a budget by 9% per year instead of 6% yields a much bigger budget eight years down the line. But at no time does Hannity or the original source take responsibility for increases coming from the White House itself. For fun I used the same flawed logic to show that the Reagan Administration itself had a "cumulative increase" of 47% in their proposed budgets, twice the Democratic contribution.
Franken discusses some of the techniques the Bush administration used during the 2000 election, but not the usual stuff about using tax dollars to remove black voters from the rolls. Do you remember allegations that John McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child? I do, and it came from "push polling" where voters were called and asked if they would be less supportive of John McCain if they knew "...he has fathered an illegitate black child...".
Other topics include a discussion on when military budgets are made and executed, concluding that the war in Afghanistan was indeed fought with Bill Clinton's military. The same one that Bush and Cheney said was "gutted" during campaign. Franken includes an enjoyable fictional tale with Bush, Cheney, Rush, Buchanan, Graham, O'Reilly and Clarence Thomas along with Kerry and Gore as soldiers in Vietnam. Of course it is interesting just how many of these guys found ways not to serve.
One fault I have with Al's book is his tendency to present several factual items supporting a point then throwing in some outlandish line, which he retracts in the next sentence or via footnote. It's a technique to make the writing more humorous, but in the surreal world of Bush's America, it hard to tell "over the top" from reality. And the net effect detracted from the work for this reader. Nonetheless I enjoyed the book and give it a thumbs up.