| Lies & The Lying Liars Who Tell Them |
| The book, according to his foreword, was written "in the spirit of dispassionate inquiry." Whether he was kidding about this or not is hard to tell, because over the course of the next 350-odd pages he manages to rise to a level of "dispassionate inquiry" when he reviewing claims and comments made by members of the right-wing media - but he invariably descends into name calling and partisan attacks. He may not be lying, but he is attacking those on the right as viciously as the right attacks the left. It becomes rather tedious and makes me question why he wrote this book.
Franken's book almost became an historic book for me. I've never stopped reading a book because I didn't like or tired of what I was reading. I've always finished every book I've started (the same cannot be said of movies or television). Franken's book is about 100 pages too long, simply rehashing the same points over and over. (Yes, Al Coulter is insane. Yes, Bill O'Reilly is nothing better than a grown-up bully. Yes, Sean Hannity is a dumb bastard). Much of Franken's satire is so mean spirited I failed to be able to see it as satire. It gets to be that you think he wrote this book just so he could personally attack people like Coulter, Hannity and O'Reilly. That and defend his friend, the late Paul Wellstone, which Franken spends a considerable amount of time doing. I actually skipped the second half of that chapter (about 10 pages) when Franken thought it was important to reprint a speech concerning Wellstone's character. This after spending a consider amount of pages explaining and defending all the events surrounding the much reported Wellstone memorial. You could tell that Franken had taken the claims that Wellstone's memorial was used as a political rally personally and was going to use his book to tell his own view of events. On the plus side, the book is funny most of the time. I enjoyed the sarcastic approach he took in debunking the myths and lies perpetuated by O'Reilly, Hannity, and other in the right-wing media outlets. Plus, Franken is a funny man and can tell a funny story. However, the repeated attacks on the same people, over the same items, start to wear you down. I like seeing these lies exposed, but this books drags on much too long - and becomes much too personal - in its pursuit of doing so. Joking or not, I wish Franken has tried a little hard to achieve " the spirit of dispassionate inquiry" he talked about at the beginning of the book. |