| LIES (AND THE LYING LIARS WHO TELL THEM) A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right Al Franken New York: Dutton, 2003 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-525-94764-6 | ||||
| ISBN 0-525-94764-7 | 377pp. | HC/BWI | $24.95 | |
| Page 99: | "Thanks for the fucking civics lesson, Tom." |
| This seems to convey irritation toward Thomas Mann. What's puzzling is that Mann is one of the good guys. He's with the Brookings Institution, which IIRC Franken actually admires as a balanced, honest source. So why the irritation? (I tried to locate the passage, earlier in the book, where Franken compares it to the Heritage Foundation, but I failed. An index would have been helpful. Or should I say, "Thanks for the fucking index, Al.") |
| Page 135: | "This continued even after two successive independent counsels (one of them, Kenneth Starr, a man not generally considered to be in the Clintons' pocket) concluded that Foster's death was, in fact, a suicide." |
| Extra comma: S/B "one of them Kenneth Starr". |
| Page 138: | "Though outraged at Clinton's unquenchable thirst for murder, it was his career as a serial rapist which provided the bitterest grist for the right-wing rumor mill." |
| Dangling participle: One way to fix it is "Though they were outraged at..." |
| Page 146: | "Rove's innovative approach to campaign strategy propelled him rapidly up the ladder to the top of the state Republican party, where he orchestrated the most complete takeover of Texas since Sam Houston routed Santa Ana at the Battle of San Jacinto. (Sam Houston was later killed at the Alamo by terrorists.)" |
| The action at the Alamo came one month before the April 1836 Battle of San Jacinto. Of course, Franken's last sentence may be another bit of obscure humor. |
| Page 158: | "Franken Beans Hijacker: Terrorist Hit in Face with More Balls than Elton John." |
| This one-liner zoomed right over my head. Was Elton John hit in the face with a baseball? If so, how did I miss that? (There is of course another way to interpret Franken's humorous imagined headline. But how would Franken know about that? Perhaps Elton John "did not have sexual relations with" Monica Lewinsky, and she subsequently testified under oath about his personal characteristics, which testimony was published in a little-known report by Kenneth Starr...) Yet another interpretation occurred to me as I read the top of page 161. Perhaps the reference to Elton John's cojones is of a piece with Franken's other mentions of gays — something to annoy homophobes, much as the Fox News slogan "fair and balanced" was said to be chosen because it drove liberals crazy. |
| Page 176: | "But that hasn't stopped the Bush administration from relying on the Journal to sell the public the most dangerous product of all: defective baby strollers that can collapse unexpectedly and crush a child." |
| Want an example of Franken's opaque humor? Here it is. If this is intended as humor, it falls flat. If it isn't, he owes us, the Journal AND the Bush administration an apology. |
| Page 213: | "...I think you'll agree that Bill Clinton remains the greatest president of the twenty-first century." |
| Well, yeah. But consider the competition... |
| Page 214: | In the excerpt from Acts 4: "...neither said any of them that ought of the things they possessed was his own; but they had all things common." |
| That ought to be the old-fashioned word "aught". I'm betting this is an editor's error. |
| Page 218: | "But instead of apologizing, Armitage bolted from the hearing room, knocking over veteran reporter Helen Thomas, breaking her hip and jaw." |
| I hadn't heard of this very newsworthy event. More obscure humor? Or something more sinister? In any case, verifying the truth of it shouldn't be hard. And it was not. A bit of Googling led me to this item on FrankenLies. The Webmaster1 checked the story by a method "pioneered" by Franken himself: he contacted Helen Thomas and asked her. No, she replied, Richard Armitage never knocked her over, and she broke no bones. Add to this the extreme unlikelihood of a foreign policy advisor bolting from a hearing in fear and later advancing in rank in the same administration. Sadly, then, this must be more of Franken's obscure humor. [UPDATE 3/07/2010] Had I known at the time that Armitage was a former Navy SEAL, I would have grokked this as a joke. |
| Page 256: | "Being black and Republican can have its rewards, however. At the 2000 convention in Philadelphia, every Republican African-American elected official in the country got to speak from the podium. City councilmen, county executives, state legislators—they all got to speak. Except one guy. Morris Temple, the county commissioner from London, Ohio. And he was pissed. I was covering the convention for ABC Radio and interviewed him." |
| In a footnote, Franken admits he "made up the whole Morris Temple story." Well, that's great. I personally tended to accept it until I saw that footnote. Then, I was still confused: What is "the whole Morris Temple story"? Judging by the next paragraph, all those black2 officials really did get to the podium — as "token niggers" (the term is mine; the meaning is Franken's). |
| Page 259: | "George W. Bush was the beneficiary of affirmative action. In more ways than we'll probably ever know. He got into Yale after a lackluster career at Andover. What people don't realize is that, like the University of Michigan, Yale had a point system when Bush applied in 1964. George W. received five points for being the son of a Yale graduate, twenty points for being the grandson of an extremely important Yale graduate, who was a U.S. senator and a Yale trustee, and a point for being a cheerleader at Andover. He almost didn't make it, though, because he lost ten points for showing up drunk to the interview. Fortunately, he got thirty points for being a Bush with over a 920 on his SATs, and he slipped through." |
| Still more stealth humor. This time, Franken provides no footnotes to help the reader sort it out. Did Dubya show up drunk at his admissions interview? Are members of his family low scorers on the Scholastic Aptitude Tests? Fair and balanced minds want to know. Actually, I think I've deduced what the problem is: Franken here tries to write like he talks in his comedy routines. Alas, without the verbal and body-language cues, his meaning doesn't always come across clearly. This also explains the phrases posing as sentences. |
| Page 294: | "I am a nut for statistics. Because numbers don't lie. Here's one idea I think is particularly telling. During the six-plus years that the two Bushes have been president, there has been not one new net job created. Not one. Extrapolating from that, if the Bushes had run this country from its very inception to the present day, not a single American would have ever worked." |
| Oy vey! This paragraph is so general as to be meaningless. And earlier Franken related how, like all Minnesotans, he has a relatively literal (not liberal) mind. So how should we parse this? As saying that the "no American ever worked" includes the two working presidents? Or that they worked for no pay, just out of the goodness of their hearts? Or that their policies would not change in 220-plus years? (Well, if they were effectively immortal, perhaps not.) In any case, having shown what statistical shenanigans Hannity attempted with his borrowed chart (page 96), Franken seems hypocritical saying this. Did he never hear Mark Twain's comment about "lies, damn lies, and statistics"? |
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