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Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them): A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right

Author: Al Franken

Publisher: Dutton

Media: Hardcover

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Product Description

Having previously dissected the factual inaccuracies of a single bellicose talk show host in Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot, Al Franken takes his fight to a larger foe: President George W. Bush, the Bush Administration, Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, and scores of other conservatives whom, he says, are playing loose with the facts. It's a lot of ground to cover, as evidenced by the 43 chapters in Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, but the results are often entertaining and insightful. Franken occupies a unique place in the modern political dialogue as perhaps the media's only comedy writer and performer who is also a Harvard fellow as well as a liberal political commentator. This unique and vaguely lonely position lends a charming quixotic quality to adventures such as a tense encounter with the Fox News staff at the National Press Club, a challenge to fisticuffs with National Review Editor Rich Lowry, and an oddly sweet admissions visit to ultra-conservative Bob Jones University (with a young research assistant posing as his son when Franken's real-life son refuses to participate in the charade). Less useful are comic book dramatizations of "Supply Side Jesus" and a fictitious Vietnam War story featuring the numerous righties who, Franken intimates, improperly avoided service. And Franken's criticisms of conservative talk show hosts Sean Hannity, O’Reilly, and columnist Coulter, while admirable in their attention to detail, fail to shed much new light on people who have built careers on broad arguments and relentless self-aggrandizement. But Franken is at his best, and most compellingly readable, when he backs off the wackiness and the personal grudges and writes about more personal matters such as the political circus surrounding the memorial service of the late Senator Paul Wellstone. But even on these more serious topics, Franken's wit is still present and, in fact, grows sharper. In a time when much political discourse is composed of rage and shouting, it's refreshing that Al Franken is able to shout in a witty manner. --John Moe
 
Average Rating: 4.0

Product Reviews

Rating: 4 StarsGreat!

I loved this book! See also George and Condi: The Last Decayed: A Collection of Poems from the Last Decade Beaver Tales and a Canada Goosing: Poems Illustrating a Uniquely Canadian Perspective (See ArtisanPacificPublishing Website).

Rating: 5 StarsFair and Balanced

This book is one of the best reads I have had in a long time. Al Franken pulls no punches when it comes to exposeing right wing conservatives for the liers and hypocrits that they really are. This book is a must read for anyone who really wants to know how politics work.

Rating: 5 StarsHumor along with a lot of hard facts.

Al Franken and his team had to work hard to write this book I'm sure. Because even though a lot of us know the media lies in favor of the RNC along with the RNC itself, sometimes it's hard to dig up the proof. Al and his team dug up the proof and presented it in a way that was fairly funny.

I try to explain to my relatives and friends how the RNC lies and distorts information to their own personal gain, but it's so complex at times simple minded people won't take the time to learn. This book gave a good number of people a chance to finally sit down and learn since it included humor to keep them interested along the way.

Rating: 3 StarsTarget: Toes

I read this book 5 pages at a time over the past 6 months, whenever I had a few minutes to kill in the smallest room in the house. This seemed somehow APPROPRIATE to the subject matter, being a jokey, light-hearted diatribe against Fox News, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and other such "opinion entertainers."

Holding them to standards of journalism is almost beside the point. They themselves never claim to represent anything resembling factual accuracy, and they rarely do. The scary part is that a substantial portion of the non-reading public do not have the breadth of experience to understand that "entertainment" is not the same as "news" and have conflated the two in their minds.

This situation makes an expose of egregious errors something akin to shooting fish in a barrel. So who is the book written for? Surely not the Fox viewers, since they don't read. Surely not Rush Limbaugh's mongrel listeners, since they probably CAN'T read. Also surely not the educated Elitist Left-Wingers since we already know Rush Is A Big Fat Idiot. In the end, the purpose of the book is left unclear since it both skewers the radical truth-impaired Right and does so in a totally frivolous, ah-shucks manner. Franken throws in exaggerations and falsehoods of his own, then retracts them, further undermining any claim he may have to seriously discussing media veracity. He skewers his own credibility, he cheapens what should be an important discussion.

In short, 5 pages at a time was about all I could take in a sitting.

Rating: 1 StarsI love this book

NOT! What trash, I thought this guy was funny, but he's nothing but an idiot and he shows it here. Fair and balanced? Now that's funny! I returned this one fast, and washed my hands. Should be recycled along with the author!
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