Rating: 
Summary: Fair and Balanced Indeed
Review: If you're driven by some insatiable desire to read books detailing the evil deeds of those America-hating liberals written by the likes of Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and the endless list of similar hacks, Al Franken's latest, "Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them," should be an instant purchase.Counterintuitive, yes, but true nonetheless. That's because in just 377 hilarious and fastidiously-researched pages, your investment ...will save you hundreds, maybe thousands, of dollars down the road. That's the money you won't spend to support the lavish lifestyles of Coulter, Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, et al when you realize how you've been duped, deceived, misled and yes, lied to, in their lucrative and dishonest careers as mud-slingers and hack-job artists. Take Coulter, for example. Not only will you learn that her much-bragged-about fetish for footnotes (that allegedly prove she's telling the truth about everything) is just plain nonsense, but you'll probably double over laughing as Franken rips her arguments into tatters. And then there's the Super Liar, O'Reilly. I previously hadn't been aware that the supposedly "independent" O'Reilly is actually registered as a Republican. Not a surprise, but just the tip of the iceberg in O'Reilly's river of Titanic fibs. Sean Hannity? His lies about Reagan's budgetary policies are dismissed with ease (and humor), not to mention his whoppers about Democrats and terrorism. Franken's analysis of Hannity's obsession with gays made me laugh until my ribs hurt. Speaking of terrorism, Franken's book makes a compelling case for what he calls the Bush program of "Operation Ignore," which was what the administration was doing on terrorism prior to September 11. What some might simply dismiss as the work of a funny guy (or, if you work for - or preach the gospel of - Fox News, an "unfunny" guy) actually provides an extremely comprehensive overview of the Bush administration's approach to terrorism in the pre-and post-September 11th world. It is not flattering, and frankly, often embarrassing... and hence something that the supposedly liberal media has only touched on lightly. It also perfectly explains why the Bush administration has ducked and weaved its way around thorough investigations of the intelligence and policy failures that culminated on September 11th. And when you consider that even Paul Bremer (now running the "51st State of Iraq") can be accurately cited by Franken for pointing out that the Clinton administration was "correctly focused on bin Laden," it makes it obvious that people like Coulter are just pimps for an administration that wants to shift the blame anywhere but at themselves. It's not surprising, then, that they've chosen to do what comes oh-so naturally for conservatives... blame Clinton. In case you were wondering, Franken knocks this "Blame Clinton" tactic out of the park. Is Franken "Fair and Balanced?" A heck of a lot more than Fox News will ever dream of being. And a lot more perceptive and thorough than the mainstream media Is he funny? Unless you're making millions by writing books targeted to conservatives or appearing as the host of a Fox talk show, you'd have to be dead not to find this an amusing (and extremely informative) read. And for you conservative book-buyers, if you would like to find out how you're being robbed blind by "authors" like Hannity and Coulter, buy this book right away. Enjoy. (And for those who would like to read further, Eric Alterman's "What Liberal Media" is simply great writing... thorough, well-researched, insightful... all the things that people like Hannity and Coulter claim to be... but aren't.)
Rating: 
Summary: Worthwhile for the left and the right.. and also very funny.
Review: If you're on the left, you already know why you will like this book. If, like me, you consider yourself to be on the right, you should check it out, too. Why? Because it reveals that the people on TV and in Washington who sound like they are on your side shouldn't be blindly trusted. As Franken shows, they are often vicious, power-hungry liars or, at the very least, willfully ignorant. Many of them aren't primarily interested in the truth, or in the principles on which the country was founded--they are primarily interested in winning the game of Republicans vs. Democrats, at any cost. And if the thought of reading about that doesn't do anything for you, there's also a lot of bathroom humor. The book seems to lose its focus toward the end, as it strays from its main theme and gets more into typical leftist policy material. As the Amazon review suggests, chapters about "Supply-side Jesus" and "Operation Chickenhawk" miss the mark. On the other hand, late chapters on Franken's personal experiences--from a scam visit to Bob Jones University that goes wrong, to a chat with an icy Barbara Bush on a plane--don't make any political points, but are highly entertaining. All in all, I recommend it, regardless of your political prejudices.
Rating:
Summary: Very Funny and Very True
Review: If you're sick to death of George Bush and the Liars who surround him, if you're sick of the stupid drivel that masquerades as news on Fox - this book will make you laugh and make you think. It was a pure pleasure. And to all the conservative bonehead idiots posting bad reviews -- I send you page 354, line six ... the 9th and 10th words. Truth to Power, Baby!
Rating:
Summary: Hilarious and intelligent.
Review: If your only going to read one book this fall, this should be it. Franken uses the Conservitive party's own words and actions against them. It's no wonder they all got mad, they don't have a leg to stand on. Although it's a very funny way of telling the truth, it also gets one very angry that the Right thinks the American people are so stupid that we wouldn't have found out about these things sooner or later. Good reading.
Rating: 
Summary: Brainwashing Is Liberalss ONLY Tool to Rob Converts
Review: Im a liberal democrat, so liberal in fact that im against war; want decriminalization of illegal narcs; am an "artist" formerly known as the artist; am a big fan of socialist catastrophe europe; believes in sick free love and same-sex marriage; and just loooove to protest my a$$ off the whole day........yet even im abashed by the furious mischief of my fellow radical fundamentalist libs, as unmasked in all of its murderously frenzied glory in these reviews! Look at how a poor independent voter gets his a$$ ferociously handed to him/her, in the review preceding mine. Look at how savagely and ragingly he's been "punished" with 19 unhelpful votes....in sharp contrast with previous reviews which have been up for hours, yet average a total of only 8 or 9 votes!???? If this is the unexplainable, mysterious dissatisfaction that my fellow liberal dems exploit to get their diseased, partisan message of "All repugs must die!" accross, then I must move even farther left than them!!!!! Only the excessively many imbalanced writings of Kerouac and Marx can save our dip$hit party now!!!
Rating:
Summary: FAIR AND BALANCED, MAY BE NOT. BUT INTERESTING, YES!
Review: IMHO, Franken is first a satirist and then a political commentator. If you have a robust personal filter that can chaff out humor from honest umembellished fact (charts and statistics, please note, are not always an objective representation of a fact) then you will find this book very enjoyable. Given the polarizing impact of this book, I was expecting a lot of strident rhetoric and distorted tirade. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised to find a fair bit of balanced, careful analysis. Franken makes a very convincing case of a number of pretty painful trivia about the Bush-clan's misgivings. Don't be surprised if you run into a chart or two even. On the other hand if you are just too hung up on this whole left/right divide and believe vehemently in whatever side of the seesaw you're on, then maybe you ought to get Bernie Goldberg's book instead and develop that personal filter I was talking about.. I would definitely recommend this book. Punchy writing, at the very least.
Rating:
Summary: Where's the Satire?
Review: In "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them", Al Franken becomes a left-wing version of the right-wing extremists he targets. Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh -- meet your left-wing counterpart: Al Franken. This book is cover-to-cover partisan ranting. First of all, how do you write a book about Liars, and in it worship every word that comes out of Bill Clinton's mouth? Bill "I didn't inhale" Clinton? Bill "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" Clinton? Hey, I voted for the guy, but come on -- a little reality please. I really gotta laugh, not because Al is funny, but because he is completely guilty of everything he accuses the republican / neo-conservative right-wingers. At one point, he launches into a rant of how the neo-cons (and other similarly labeled individuals) are mean, but Al is guilty of the same sourness. He plans a trip to Bob Jones University (BJU -- ok, that's funny) to make fun of a bunch of people with deeply moral / religious beliefs -- you know, like unmarried couples on a date need to be chaperoned to prevent immoral behavior. Not that I have the same beliefs. I don't! But I don't plan trips to places where they congregate with like-minded folks to try to make fun of them. The whole concept was a complete failure. He even had to admit that everyone -- to a person -- that they met were extremely nice. Later in the book, Al annoys Barbara Bush who is, by chance, on the same flight as he. His whole approach to this nonsense is that because Mrs Bush doesn't wish to deal with him after he explains that he plans to use her son for material, then of course, she's mean. Well, I guess as long as you're being mean to the other side, it's ok. Last point. Back when political satirists could actually produce material worth buying and reading, these political pieces used to cut into their target making a valid point and providing excellent entertainment. Today, they're mindless rants. Anyone can rant. In the introduction, Al explains that if you're reading something that doesn't quite make sense to you, then it's probably a joke that you didn't get. Well, thanks for blaming this material on your audience Al, but that's just not the way it is. Was it interesting? No. Was it funny? No. Where's the satire? I want my money back.
Rating:
Summary: A return to form, Franken artfully mixes laughs and politics
Review: In "Lies," Al Franken returns to his "Big Fat Idiot" style of mixing scathing satire and irreverence with genuine political observations. He devotes chapters to correcting the likes of Coulter, Hannity, O'Reilly, and others but instead of being shrill, he debunks them with high humor, while condemning them with carefully researched transcripts of their more ridiculous statements. Franken's wit makes what might otherwise be an upsetting account of right-wing dishonesty an enjoyable page turner. Although all that irreverant wit meant that sometimes Franken's revelations, such as the fact that Bill O'Reilly wrote a novel about a murderous power-hungry newsman who violently kills his critics called "Those Who Trespass," left me wondering "is that for real?" - (disturbingly, it is real, go ahead and do a search for it) If you liked his earlier "Big Fat Idiot," then you will certainly enjoy "Lies" as it is basically a modern version of the same concept but with new subjects and new jokes. I found it a lot funnier and more interesting than his hypothetical "Why Not Me?" This was a somewhat quick, but very worthwhile read.
Rating:
Summary: A funny and disconcerting book
Review: In "Lies..." Al Franken does an excellent job using humor to keep the reader from getting too depressed about the state of affairs in America. I think this is why I've heard several conservative people I know say they appreciate the book(yes some conservatives actually read. gasp!!!). The content is very serious of course, which is why I cannot read more than one book consecutively about the Bush regime, but Franken's wit makes it more enjoyable than the usual Bush indictments. It is hard to believe there are people that support that phony and his pseudo populist rhetoric, but I guess it takes all kinds.
Rating:
Summary: A triumph for joking pundits who "kid on the square"
Review: In "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them", Al Franken does an admirable job of skewering the self-righteous, chauvinistic, pompous, and otherwise publicity-inflated bloviating pundits of Fox News who make a living by distorting the news, misleading the public, and generally serving as a propaganda machine for the Bush administration. And what makes this well-justified hatchet job so enjoyable is that he manages to be funny, and often, very funny, all while telling the truth. Like Mr. Franken, I find the dishonesty and bullying by Fox pundits to be offensive and at times outright revolting. But while many of us merely growl at the Fox misinformation service or turn the channel in disgust, this SNL-veteran has done the public a service by exposing some of the particular deceptions and lies of people like Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity (although in the particular case of Mr. Hannity, the fault may lie with the fact that he is a rather dim bulb rather than any deliberate desire to deceive. It was Mr. Hannity after all, who offered up the most revealing quotation of the book: "I don't have the time to refute every fact here"). Mr. Franken's satirical take on the "fair and balanced" Fox News Channel effectively documents (for those who had not already picked up on this just by watching) that Bill O'Reilly is a self-righteous bully incapable of listening; that Sean Hannity is a pompous fool; and that Ann Coulter, well, there is something just not quite right about that woman. Possibly rabies. Just "kidding on the square" there; more likely she's just crazy. But it would be a mistake to see this book as anti-conservative; it is not. It is anti-dishonesty. Not all conservatives are dishonest, but it is interesting that so many conservatives take an attack on dishonesty to be an attack on conservative ideas in general. The book IS angry and it is from a liberal perspective; it doesn't pretend to be impartial (making irrelevant the bitter comments of right-wing reviewers here that this book is bad because it is somehow "one-sided"). Mostly this book is funny; in a certain sense, it is a "joke", as some conservative reviewers have complained, although not in the sense that they intended. But what it IS against is the kind of intellectual dishonesty and indifference to truth that has become so characteristic of so much of right-wing discourse, especially on television. Are there liars on the left? No doubt, and shame on them for it (although you probably won't find many of them on talk radio in any case). This is a book about people on the right, people who have a much higher television/radio/news profile than any comparable figures on the left that I can think of. And I think Mr. Franken is right in suggesting that some of the worst liars in public discourse today are situated on the right. I do think the book is uneven in places. The "Operation Chickenhawk" section, while it underlines an important hypocrisy characteristic of many on the right, is nevertheless a bit cartoonish and over-the-top for my taste; I prefer Franken when he is merely skewering lies with facts. Referring to Bill "O'Lie-lly" might be an understandable response to Bill O'Reilly's outrageous and bullying behavior at the book conference, but it is a kind of name-calling that isn't nearly as effective in making Franken's point as the mere documentation of O'Reilly's actual lies (such as his supposed political independence). For me, the strongest and most important chapter involved the conservative media treatment and distortion of the events at Paul Wellstone's memorial service (which then translated into a wider distortion in the wider media). Franken's treatment is this issue is angry but controlled, and is in its own right a fine tribute to the memory of a man I respected as the finest Senator in the U.S. Senate in my lifetime, an honorable voice for the disenfranchised and politically marginalized. The question is, when will those right-wing voices who made so much controversy on the basis of so little justification ever find it in themselves to apologize, to admit they did wrong? It will, no doubt, be a cold day in hell before that happens, but as Mr. Franken documents, it is an apology to the country that these well-paid but badly informed(?) political spinmeisters on the right surely owe to the public. So buy the book. It's not perfect, but it is very good. It is funny and outrageous; and at times sad, even moving; it is loaded with facts and spiced with satire. And as the reviewer from Midland, Texas, pointed out, we all owe Fox News a debt of gratitude for their absurd lawsuit against Mr. Franken, which helped propel this fine satire to the top of the best-seller lists. As for those conservatives who fear and despise this book, all I can say is, read it and weep.
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