Rating: 
Summary: I hold O'Reilly and Coulter near and dear...
Review: so I had to read this book. I am a loyal Fox news fan and enjoy the passionate rhetoric of my favorite commentators. But I like Fox because it ISN'T fair and balanced, it crooks to the right like me. Bush-bashing irritates me. Clinton irritates me more. But I wanted to see things from the perspective of those leaning to the left, and since Franken took a few pages to direct aim at O'Reilly and Coulter, his book it was.I think this one's a must read for any conservative who finds him/herself riled up by Hannity and O'Reilly or in reading any of Coulter's columns or books. It's funny, and you don't have to agree with Franken's every opinion to enjoy the ride. I'm far more cynical about our government and shoddy excuse for a media having read this book. I'm still watching my favorite commentators, but I'm watching with a more critical eye. I finished this in a weekend, so it's a fast, fun read. But I'm only giving it three stars because I don't agree with what Franken calls lies (given I'm not sure every "lie" he details is intentional or even all that relevant to the character of the person telling them). His sources are well cited but his personal attacks on O'Reilly and Coulter seemed like a waste of space. Who cares how old Coulter is? I want to know more about the cutthroat spin employed by political parties to win elections and public favor. His self-effacing humor and laid back writing style appealed to me, which is pretty big considering I'm a fan of the screaming, passionate flag-wavers. I'm forcing my conservative minded friends to read it too. The only shot any of us have of getting informed is to read all sides of those issues important to us and make our own decisions. We clearly can't depend on our political figures or news sources to give us fair and balanced anything.
Rating: 
Summary: WEAK
Review: So I see "liberals" are consulting failed comedians for their political dogma and regurgitated non-ideas about how the world works. I think Im going to follow suit and read up on Daffy Ducks works on chemical engineering! Get a life SUCKERS PS- great job with that Dean campaign, Franken. Guess his appeal only applied to borderline sociopaths like yourself!!!
Rating: 
Summary: a great book about circus clowns
Review: so i've always been something of a passive radical. but then i grow up - and i end up working around a lot of conservatives after college due to this odd mistress o' mine, science. and i realize that many of these people aren't so bad, that many actually lead these earnest lives of quiet reserve. and so i learn to be somewhat forgiving. Then, when i hear colin powell on national television going on about clandestine nuclear programs designed to destroy all human life, i really believe that he might mean what he saying for half a second. i tell my dad (an ex-military man) this observation... and he tells me that I'm completely crazy. "there is no threat in iraq, iraq is a country of goats and dirt." And that if there had ever been any legitimate nuclear threat in iraq, the Israeli's would have taken them out long ago. And now I'm just stunned because he was so right - these guys that are in office right now are completely self-serving, political aristocrats that are leaning dangerously close to human rights violations in respect to their treatment of the muslim world (I look at pictures of muslim leaders and think they look mean - but hell yeah, they're mean - we're trying to systematically take them out). Anywho, Two morals to this story, actually. The first - there are some conservatives that are utterly sincere and intelligent people. The second, thank god for people like al Franken that are going out on a limb to keep people's attention on the guys at the top that aren't.
Rating:
Summary: Clinton loved this book...
Review: So if the head liar loves it, the hateful liberals will adore it. Let us not forget that Frankens idol, Clinton was a do-nothing lying, and impeached fool.....and Franken proves himself a worthy student, sans impeachement. Are we sure that Franken isn't Rosey O. in drag?
Rating:
Summary: To Shelly from OR
Review: So is it appropriate for the author of this conservative trashing book to call Rush Limbaugh 'a big fat idiot'?? Is it approriate to wish him ill-fate after he gets out of rehab??
If you wanna be 'PC' let's not pick and choose to whom you can apply that to.
Rating:
Summary: Not what you might expect
Review: So many conservatives associate Al Franken with all that is evil in society. In his latest tome, however, there is much less sprawling of his trademark invective than one might expect from the former SNL comic. For whatever reason, be it that he's trying to appear less anathematic to the right, or whatever else, he tries to paint a more factual picture. Some of his assessments are sensible and true. On the other hand, some of the commentary is just childish and vengeful. You can just see the rabid foaming of his mouth as he writes. Take for example, Bill O'Reilly; the best Franken could muster up is that he misspoke about winning a Peabody on "Inside Edition." This is generally what makes the book difficult and will have you throwing it against the wall. The points make sense, but Franken sometimes make huge leaps to make those points, and the end result is dismal. Franken overplays "TeamFranken", a bunch of Harvard whiz kids that are supposed to lend credibility to his high-school level arguments and taking things out of context. Bottom line: it's somewhat amusing on a comedic level, and of course to laugh at Franken's sometimes misplaced logic, but the level of discourse rarely reaches high ground... check it out at your library.
Rating:
Summary: Franken is a Liar
Review: So so so immature. Franken is a ranting, out of control, ninkumpoop. His book is devoid of fact, full of hate and unfunny. Franken has perfected the art of namecalling as a substitute for political commentary. Grow up Al!
Rating:
Summary: Facts trump fabrication; humor beats spite...
Review: So the first thing a lot of people point out the obvious; Al Franken is a humorist. That does give him a little bit of latitude to be cutting in some of his remarks (though he accuses no one of high crimes and misdemeanors based on manipulated research and conjecture, like some Coulters we know). What it also does, is help make this book very funny. What it does not do is take away any of the legitimacy of the well-researched facts he points out, nor does it lessen the impact of the eye-roll inducing stories. But it is more than funny. One way or another, this book will invoke some anger. If you are inclined toward the right-dominated media, you'll quickly affect annoyance and dismiss this book. If you are inclined to believe what is true, and you don't mind a few slaps at icons of the right, you'll enjoy Franken's book, but will seethe at revelations of media manipulation and outright lies by the right. In the end, Franken is no mystery - so you probably have a pretty good idea of whether or not you'll like this book. Besides, you should read books because they interest you - not because someone tells you to, right?
Rating:
Summary: Stuart Smalley Has Quit His Day Job In The Land Of OBSCURITY
Review: So the pitiful parade of closet liberals masquerading as "independents" or Republicans, even, is growing larger and longer by the second. Take the last committer of this fraud, David Beall, who further contributes disrepute by claiming he's an expatriate living in the States for 15 years. What really aggravates one is the increasingly, self-righteously derisive number of positive reviewers who are regularly resorting to tarnishing those Americans that support Bush, or are Republican/Conservative, as being less sophisticated than their unwashed, inert, work-shirking, less productive and less affluent European counterparts. David Beall's review does this nicely, as he attempts to cite-get this-for the "first time" ever in all the reviews, "real" reasons to support Franken's gibberish and "debunk" the one-star reviews. Obviously, his comments are exclusively either so discriminatingly suffocating, so to be unstable and extremist in nature, superficially profiling based on general stereotypes of conservatives, ridiculously immaterial "points" that are harshly secondary to the topic, or DOWNRIGHT, utterly imperfect, unmasking its nature in an unqualified background. Beall spews that the mean Frenchman bests his American counterpart. Beall cites false proofs like Frenchmen "having 4-6 weeks vacation a year, enjoy long lunches with excellent wine, can wander through streets with beautiful architecture, have affordable health care, job security and very little poverty". To anyone NOT programmed with anti-American propaganda from radical sites like Tom Payne, this is offensively outraging. Here's the amending correction to that reviewer's increasingly moronic and classless tripe. France is currently in RECESSION, has DOUBLE-DIGIT unemployment, its government must now stoop to helped employment and its workers aren't nearly as productive as Americans. These are cold FACTS. Do these actual statistics really correspond to David Beall's agenda of smearing Americans as inferiors, where he claims that the French have "job security" and "very little poverty"?? Does anyone really think that having 6 weeks vacation in their incrementally worker protected land is not to blame for their comparably lesser wealth??? Further, since Beall is so loathsomely undereducated about economies, that elusive "French job security" is EXACTLY why they're recession prone-because laws force businesses in Europe to pay lazy bums even when they're not working and it's much more expensive for European firms to cut workers in recessionary times, all further contributing to a feeble economy with lower living standards! Next, Beall loses control in another prejudicial attack, this time on the American worker. He writes, "His American counterpart is lucky to get 2 weeks vacation, works like a dog, eats processed meat from factory farms without proper hygiene and worker safety/benefits, and were there a good chance he lives below the poverty level having had a comparatively poor education, and his future probably means he will lose his manufacturing job in exchange for a job at K-Mart." It's really an outrage for ragingly glaring, closet liberals to try to pull this scheme off. A Frenchman's American counterpart is under no pressure to get only 2 weeks vacation; he does this because of his superior work ethic, wherein America's mentality is more along the lines of working hard to achieve what one wants to attain, instead of the panhandling mentality of France, where that stigma has certainly materialized in LESS jobs and LOWER economic growth. Because of a Frenchman's American counterpart's humbly small vacation time, his American counterpart also enjoys higher living standards in terms of personal wealth, higher pay, stronger spending power, and ultimately contributes to the States' enviably, significantly higher GDP output-both in spending and production, which is the logical side effect of also having much higher production than ol' Europe. All of these factors blatantly improve comforts for people, hence their quality of life. David Beall's jeers at the American worker supposedly living "below the poverty level" is more confirmation of a closet liberal, owing to how insanely biased that is, and how unschooled that statement is. If the American worker's wealth is directly proportional to his output (Americans are number one), it's discreditable for that failure to even write that. Next, stats say that the States boasts the best graduate school program the world over, so, again, it's blasphemy for someone to curse that an American has "comparatively poor education". Anyone still not convinced that Beall is the guiltiest closest liberal prowling these messages?? The last straw is when this closet liberal assaults a job at K-Mart, obviously in his scornfully elitist mind, equating jobs in the retail sector with being demeaning. A fictional employee at K-Mart, much like Wal-Mart (world's biggest employer of workers, btw), would garner advantageous benefits and probably stock options also. Not like in unhygienic France, and miserably most of Europe, where companies are REQUIRED by European's misguided ignorance to "look out for everyone equally", where they waste the comparable 21 billion that the American worker is putting back into his economy, with the infamous French welfare-system/garbage of unnaturally LONG unemployment benefits and punishing penalties for companies that need to downscale by firing employees, by intensifying the money employers HAVE to pay to reduce workforce. Conclusion: If this David Beall, closet liberal, is the best example of the liberals here, who so high-handedly and hypocritically challenge the right to "provide facts", citing "facts" to "back up" their "points", then liberal reasoning is cancerously impaired. Liberals here, and David Beall, need to get an education, a clue, AND a life. Scariest of all, NOT necessarily in that order.
Rating:
Summary: I'm a conservitive idiot
Review: So what. Yeah I hate liberals. I said it. I'm a conservative! I love money and people who make lots of it. That's what I do. That's my job. I'll admit it. If you think differently then you are a communist. Well, I'm not sure what that means but I know it's bad. If you read this book and you like it then you are bad because the president is a great man, even though he didn't get elected legally. Hey I pride myself on being the first republican to admit that I stand up for my side regardless of the lies and regardless of the selfeshness. So what if we went to war for oil and rebuilding rights in Iraq. We deserve it because we are Americans and we deserve to get what we steal. Land, labor, resources... what ever. I love this country and everything it pretends to stand for. And if you don't like it, you can stuff it. That's right, yah lousy liberals, I said stuff it. You people think you're so smart with your facts and your nutty ideas about equality and world peace. I say down with the mud people. We whites will reign and you will all continue to slave away, making me richer and you poorer. FOREVER FOREVER FOREVER!!!
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