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

Franken, Al

3.82

29,449 ratings by Goodreads

9781565117976: Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right

ISBN 10: 1565117972 ISBN 13: 9781565117976

Publisher: HighBridge Audio, 2003

For the first time since his bestselling RUSH LIMBAUGH IS A BIG FAT IDIOT, Franken trains his subversive wit directly on the contemporary political scene. Now, the "master of political humor" (Washington Post) destroys the myth of liberal bias in the media and exposes how the Right shamelessly tries to deceive the rest of us. No one is spared as Al uses the Right's own words against them: not Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Roger Ailes, the entire Fox network nor the Bush administration. This is the book Al Franken fans have been waiting for (and his foes have been dreading).

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Review:

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

About the Author:

Two-time spoken word Grammy � award winner AL FRANKEN is the author of four previous bestsellers. A long-time comedy writer who rose to prominence as one of the original Saturday Night Live writers in the 1970s, Franken won five Emmy� Awards for his work on SNL.

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