Al Franken.html

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, by Al Franken.
Dutton, 2003 379 pages.
_____________________________________________________________________________________

Al Franken Is a Big,
Boring Hypocrite

____________________________________________________________
Tim Slagle
____________________________________________________________

Since Rush Limbaugh ushered in the age of talk radio, there has been a remarkable change in the political landscape. Leftist politics have suffered a slow, agonizing death. The two-way nature of the medium has destroyed the separation of speaker and audience that leftist policy requires. Leftist ideas have retreated to places where only one-way communication is still the order of the day, such as college campuses, where the threat of a bad grade suppresses contrary ideas, as well as the KGB ever did. Whether in Television shows like The West Wing or in movie excreta "starring" Warren Beatty, opposition to socialist thought is strictly controlled. The script ensures that only straw men can ever attack the dominant ideals.

Among the few comforts left-- such as they are -- for people who still believe that socialism can work is the comedian Al Franken. Franken sifts through right wing books, newspapers, and broadcasts looking for apparent errors, then compiles these errors in easy to read books. Leftist readers are happy to learn that they are still on the proper side, without having to go through the arduous process of evaluating any arguments on their own. Actually, it's pretty easy for Franken too, he researched this book with a staff of 14 student volunteers and an office provided, gratis, by the Shorenstein Center on the Press, and Public Policy at (you will never guess) the Kennedy School for Government at Harvard University! I doubt that such a fellowship has ever been granted to anyone, let alone a television comic, who wanted to write a book debunking Noam Chomsky.

Franken's intellectual level is curiously worthy of Harvard. According to him, the Confederacy fought the Civil War just "So they could whip and torture black people." As for economics: "Capital gains come from money making money without anyone actually working. Thus our nations most generous tax laws will now apply to the children of the very rich inheriting money even their parents didn't earn." Or try this: "very generally speaking (tax cuts) happen to hurt black people and help rich people. Who tend to be white."

Franken epitomizes everything I hate about leftists. He is smug and arrogant and of course, a left-liberal, because he's smarter than you. He believes that such people as himself love America "like grown-ups" unlike conservatives love America as a child loves his mommy. He is unaware that this is, well, a tad ironic, coming from a man who devotes a whole chapter to a fictional dialog involving a waitress who learns that her $365 dollar tax cut will cost her close to $5000 in entitlements.

He attributes the perceived leftist bias in the press to the fact that most journalists have "an advanced power of discernment," so naturally they lean that way. He then proceeds to prove that the media is not liberal after all. Quite an accomplishment, eh? Media liberals behave like Communist cells each of which operated independently, so that if one cell was detected it would not bring down the others. Part of the creed is, you never identify a fellow traveler as such. For instance, at one point Franken cites a study done by The Project for Excellence in Journalism funded by the Pew Charitable trusts. He then goes on to describe Pew as "totally mainstream" and "without a political axe to grind." Please. As any NPR listener will tell you, the contributions of Pew to public discourse are not distributed without prejudice.

Franken gets great joy out of transcribing phone and television interviews he's had where he's come off as superior, and reminding people that he was a writer for Saturday Night Live back when it was funny. He spends a good portion of his time name dropping, and he brags about how he smarted off to people like Barbara Bush and Karl Rove. He also cites his USO tours with John Glenn as definitive proof that he is patriotic

Those who are looking for actual lies told by the Right are going to be greatly disappointed. A lie is a purposeful misrepresentation: "Leftists tend to be smarter than the general population," or "I never had sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky," or "Al Franken is amusing" Most of the lies Franken identifies appear to be honest mistakes. For example, he identifies Bill O'Reilly's statement that "58% of all single mom homes are on welfare." as a lie. But it's pretty plain that O'Reilly was just confused, as men his age have a tendency to get. With close to 60% of all out-of-wedlock births ending up on AFDC, and 53% of those on welfare being single mothers it's easy to see that O'Reilly might be confused. It's also easy to see that O'Reilly had no need to fabricate.

Hypocrisy abounds. After mocking Ann Coulter (on page 9) for pointing out that the Washington Bureau Chief of Newsweek, Evan Thomas was related to Norman Thomas, the six time Socialist Party candidate for President, Franken stoops to the same depths (on page 166) by mentioning that the father of Washington Times editor, Wesley Pruden, was a chaplain for the KKK.

Franken catches the Wascawy Wepublicans in a terrible lie . Dick Cheney reflected on his regular helicopter commute over the Arlington Cemetery where he would look at the "crosses row on row." (218) Franken takes an unnatural delight in pointing out that the headstones in Arlington are rectangular, rather than crosses, and that Cheney was just lifting a line from "Flanders Field (sic)." Well, I think we all know where the line came from, and I suspect that Cheney was quoting rather than plagiarizing. And most of the headstones have crosses carved in the stone. So what?

Al Franken discounts the Linda Ives case, one of the centerpieces of the "Mena conspiracy" in Clintonian Arkansas. Linda Ives had to get a grand jury order to have the bodies of her son Kevin and his friend Don Henry exhumed and shipped out of State before discovering they were murdered. Witnesses suggested the crimes were perpetrated by State troopers, one of whom was later indicted for drug trafficking. No formal investigation was ever completed, and the case remains open 16 years later. Bill Clinton was governor at the time, and he refused to fire the coroner, Fahmy Malek, instead shifting him to another State job (incidentally, the same coroner had, previously and erroneously, found Clinton's mother innocent of negligent homicide). In 1992 Linda Ives' name curiously surfaced on a White House attack list of right-wing conspiracy nuts. That discovery prompted The Wall Street Journal article that Franken references.

Ignoring the facts of this case would probably be called a lie by Al's standards, but I'll chalk it up to simple apathy and blind, ignorant love of Bill Clinton. You think I'm exaggerating? On page 140 he quotes Hillary's description of Bill Clinton as his own," he was tall and handsome [and} had a vitality that seemed to shoot out of his pores." How could anyone dislike such a man? Well... "The Clinton's energy, their intellectual intensity, their compassion for those on the margins of society, their fundamental belief that the world could be made a better place -the right found all of these extremely irritating."

Let me say what I had against Bill Clinton: I thought he was clever enough to convince people that he really cared, when his only motivations were to nail anything that moved and to satisfy his meglomaniacal wife's insatiable lust for power. I hated the way he would run over anything that got in his path, like the lowly travel office employees who had their lives destroyed by an unwarranted FBI investigation. Most of all, I hated the fact that the Clintons loathed the Constitution, regarding it as a contemptible barrier on the way to their better dream for America.

But the "lie" Franken is proudest of having found, is that a National Security Council spokesperson gave Time magazine an account of a meeting with Sandy Berger that differed from the account Condoleezza Rice gave the New York Times. Discovery of this typical bureaucratic snafu, Franken says, caused him to "shout for joy and dance around the room naked, celebrating the finding of a lie...embarrassing my wife and her bridge group."

That is indeed embarrassing. But what's most embarrassing about it, and the book as a whole, is the lack of humor. With 379 pages to work with, Franken was unable to draw even a chuckle out of me. Most of his ostensible humor is in the "they're so stupid, or they're so racist or they're so homophobic" vein. That's humor? Another gimmick is to fictionalize a conversation. For instance, when some of Sean Hannity's numbers don't seem to add up, "I faxed the table over to some good friends, and Ken Lay, former CEO of Enron, got back to me in a jiff." Ha ha. There follows a sophomoric "dialogue" with Lay.

Then there's the ironic thrust that doesn't hit the mark. "At each (USO) stop, I entertained the troops with anti-American jokes." In a comic book style chapter called, "Supply Side Jesus", a biblical character travels the Holy Land dressed in finery and riding on a camel. He tells the multitudes how being rich helps the poor, and how giving to the lepers encourages leprosy. It is a great illustration of how the Left views itself, as genuinely Christlike. It invites someone to write a story called "Socialist Jesus," in which Jesus uses tax collectors and centurions to loot and pillage in the name of the halt and blind.

I've never been a big fan of what I call comedy of ignorance, the comic's pretense that he doesn't know something and is therefore puzzled by it. This technique was practically trademarked by Jerry Seinfeld (Why do they call it Safeway? What would be the dangerous way to shop for groceries?) Franken follows by writing about "Porn Bombing;" -- about how the departing staff of the White House inserted pornographic images into copy machines, so someone might print a document over a naked girl, and end up sending it out accidentally. By now, we are all familiar with that prank; some of us even found it a little funny. But Franken feigns ignorance: "Unlike Matt Drudge I've never experienced a porn bombing. I can only imagine that a porn bomb is a form of a 'dirty bomb,' consisting of a conventional explosive surrounded by a thick coating of dirty books and pictures. When the bomb goes off, the filth, either images or bits of text could contaminate schoolyards, churches, even John Ashcroft's morning prayer meeting." Clearly this is supposed to be funny. It's just not. More amusing, though unconsciously so, is Franken's claims that the Right fabricated "vandalism" rumors to discredit the departing Democrats. Franken quotes "a 217 page report that found no damage to the White House nor to the Executive Office building." According to the Washington Post, the report found $19,000 in damages. To me, that's a substantial amount of vandalism. But Al Franken makes a lot more money than I do.

The subtitle " A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right" was selected to get under the skin of Fox News. It did. Fox filed a trademark infringement lawsuit (and lost). But alas, Franken's balance is as far of as he believes Fox News is. His 14 interns didn't somehow weren't as interested in checking the claims of the Left as they were in checking the claims of the Right. Consider the books reporting of a 2001 confrontation between Bill O'Reilly and the Los Angeles Times, Melissa Payton. O'Reilly claimed that the Times never once mentioned the name of Juanita Broaddrick, and he was corrected. "her paper's archives contained twenty-one articles mentioning Broaddrick." Easy enough to check. Ms. Payton must have been aware of the topic and had obviously done an Internet search right before the interview. There were exactly twenty one mentions. I'm not sure you can call them "articles" however. Two mentions were jokes in Laugh Lines, two were reviews, two were letters to the editor, four were TV listings, three were editorials, and one was an editorial about TV listings. Of the seven remaining, three were about negative Republican strategy for the upcoming election or the budget battle, one was a legal analysis on the statute of limitations, one was Clifton's denial, one was about his legacy; and the one remaining was originally published back on page B7: "Accusers Claim Has Ring of Credibility" by Michael Kelley. Unbiased? You be the judge.

But let's look, in more detail at Franken's treatment of a more important episode. A long chapter discusses how the Right used a raucous moment during solemn memorial services for Sen. Paul Wellstone to win control of the Senate in 2002. According to Franken, a brief moment of exuberance towards the close of the event was broadcast repeatedly to give the impression it was more like a rally. Now, my friend Louis, who is a club owner in Minneapolis, sat through most of that memorial. Louis, is by no means a Republican, and had even hosted fund-raisers for Wellstone. He assures me that it was a grossly premature Democratic victory rally. So certain were the Democrats, that the people of Minnesota would never vote for a Republican during the Wellstone mourning period, that they started celebrating a week early. So exuberant, and so polemical, did they become that the governor of the state, an independent, walked out of the ceremony in disgust. When I got to Minneapolis five days later, you could tell something had happened. People were walking the streets carrying Mondale signs, and on their faces were looks of remorse. I recognized that expression well; it was the same look I always have after I've been really drunk, did something exceedingly stupid, and want somebody to believe I'm sorry. Louis said the mood of Minneapolis was visibly changed the day after the memorial. People in the hippie coffee shop where he gets his morning beverage, were saying that there was no excuse for that kind of behavior, and they could not vote for Mondale.

In Louis own words: "Here is another thing about the Wellstone memorial: I wasn't offended that much by the guy [Rick Kahn] who took all the blame. He was just doing his job as a worker for the Democrats. It was Wellstone's son that pissed me off the most. He was screaming 'Vote for Mondale, that's what my father wants!'" The biggest indicator of what really happened at the service, was that Minnesota voted overwhelmingly Republican. Besides Wellstone's seat, the governor' office, the majority of US house seats and a lot of the state House and Senate seats went to the GOP. Franken claims that the right-wing Minneapolis Star Tribune misrepresented the event. I think he's been living in New York too long. The Star Tribune is one of the most liberal newspapers in America, and that it thought the service got out of hand was indicative of what really happened. Most Minnesotans relied on their own opinion anyway, as they had seen all four hours of the service; it was covered by all the local stations in Minnesota

At the end of the book, Franken outlines his strategy for the Democrats in the upcoming election. In an uncharacteristically odd recognition of the free market of ideas, he admits that Rush and Fox are popular because they are entertaining. "But a part of their entertainment value comes from their willingness to lie and distort....We can't do that. We have to fight them with the truth. Our added entertainment will have to come from being funny and attractive"

Truthful, Funny, Attractive. That's three strikes against Mr. Franken.

Correction 1/9/04: Patrick, an alert reader, noticed that the year Linda Ives' name appeared on the White House attack list was not 1992 as suggested, but 1997. For a more in-depth story on that attack list, you can visit: The New York Observer.

Meanwhile, friends who enjoy seeing Al Franken receive the same kind of unyielding scrutiny he heaps onto others, will enjoy visiting: Frankenlies.com

videos/information/tour updates/the NATIONAL/Headquarters/Comments