Franken Buries
Well, that didn’t take long. Al Franken’s latest, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, went down like the last slice of strawberry cheese cake, and now I’m a little buzzed and also have a bit of a headache. But it was worth it.
First the bad news. Not every word of this tome is classic, even for true believers. A lot of the debunking that Franken does may already be familiar to readers of Conason, Alterman, or sites like the Daily Howler, and not even Franken’s wit is enough to breathe new life into those well-flogged horses. In two protracted episodes – the visit to Bob Jones University and a reprise of the “chickenhawk” schtick that proved so popular in its original incarnation in Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot – we see that Franken has not completely outgrown the tendency of Saturday Night Live writers to produce the occasional unfunny skit that goes on way too long. There’s something forced and perfunctory – not to mention obvious – about these routines, as Franken all but acknowledges. Fortunately, this is entirely offset by the good stuff.
Lying Liars has a few simple objectives.
- Set the record straight about many egregious and uncorrected distortions of the truth propagated by the Right and its accomplices/stooges in the media.
- Expose the vilest and most hypocritical exponents of know-nothing conservatism as ignorant bullies who play fast and loose with the truth by deconstructing their rhetoric and methods with surgical precision.
- Show that many of the “lying liars” are not simply ideologues expounding a political perspective that Franken disagrees with or (in all cases) idiots, but dishonest, shameless, lazy and dishonorable people who, for their own reasons, are deliberately spreading deception and confusion.
It’s this last point where Lying Liars consistently hits the bullseye. The most satisfying moments of the book are those where Franken relates stories of confronting specific malefactors with the clear evidence of their deception, as when he calls both Peggy Noonan and Tucker Carlson on having (mis)-reported on the Paul Wellstone memorial service without having actually seen it. To his credit, Franken does not suggest some kind of monolithic conspiracy as the best or only explanation behind the methods and tactics of the right wing media. Often, all it takes is a well-placed lie or spin at the center of a story, and wishful thinking, poor journalistic skills and sloppy ethics take care of the rest.
Lying Liars will draw inevitable comparisons to partisan political screeds on the other end of the spectrum, such as recent books by Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity and the ubiquitous Bill O’Reilly. While Franken shares with these authors a certain lack of charity toward his opponents, the similarities end there. First and foremost, Franken is funny. He’s clever, he’s self-deprecating, he has a certain way with words, and he has a fine sense of the absurd. If only as a matter of style, Franken’s nimble prose goes down much easier than Hannity’s platitudinous bluster or Coulter’s drunken elephant walk through a field of straw men.
The second major point of difference is substance. The aforementioned volumes from the right – and their true lefty analogue, the work of Michael Moore – are famously riddled with errors of fact. As Franken points out in generous and specific detail, each of those authors makes systematic use of misleading, meaningless or outright false information to support their views (thus the title, Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them). By going back to the original sources – when the author bothers to cite a source – he shows how information was taken not just out of context, but in ways that utterly distort and falsify the point the original writer was trying to make. Occasionally and hilariously, a close look at the data shows that the correct conclusion to be drawn is precisely the opposite of what the author had in mind (as with the Wall Street Journal’s manipulation of crime statistics in a February, 2003 article). Every so often, he is able to follow up and confront the fabricator with his interpretation – efforts Franken reports are almost unanimously met with evasion and silence.
When undertaking this kind of debunking exercise, it’s a good idea to cover your own ass. For this reason, Franken’s book is fairly well sourced and annotated, and the specifics he cites are usually full excerpts and probably so readily verifiable that any attempt at spin or falsification on his own part would be rather stupid. I am curious to see if any conservative sites attempt to “truth squad” Franken’s work. I think they will have to, for to leave his arguments intact means copping to a staggering amount of intellectual dishonesty, idiocy, and pure meanness.
Franken does more than a little preaching to the choir, and his book is likely to meet with the most enthusiastic response from people who already agree with what he has to say. He also delights in being a gratuitously obnoxious twit often enough to test the patience of even those who fervently share his views. For this reason, Lying Liars will probably be dismissed as partisan propaganda by the very people who should, at the very least, understand the kind of fundamental objections that exist toward a certain type of toxic, fact-free style of argument popular and increasingly pervasive on the Right.
11:02:59 AM 
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