Rating: 
Summary: hip hip hooray
Review: 3 cheers for Al Franken! And number 1 at that. There is hope for us yet. Wonderful book...new respect for Franken. I want more! Read Jim Hightower and Greg Palast for even more....
Rating:
Summary: Too funny to put down!
Review: 43 fact filled chapters make if hard to do other things like
watch unemployment stat on the News Hour. Very hard to put down.
Not only is Al Franken smarter than everyone at Fox News he even LOOKS
smarter! For a sneak peek here are some gems:
"Ann Coulter: Nutcase"
"Paul Gigot is Unable to Defend an Incredibly Stupid Wall Street Journal Editorial"
"Bill O'Reilly: Lying, Splotchy Bully"
"Vast Lagoons of Pig Feces: The Bush Environmental Record"
- - and those are just from the bibliography!I can't finish this book review... gotta get back to him chopping up Ann Coulter
when she lied that the Times didn't cover Dale Earnhardt's sudden death,
displaying some Times-elitist anti-NASCAR bias she says they have.
Rating: 
Summary: How many stars for defamation?????
Review: 5 stars is supposed to mean it's among the best books I've ever read. Anyone who gives this book 5 stars should read another book in this lifetime. Can I give it a negative number of stars? Now that I've read it can I have the wasted time back?
Rating: 
Summary: LOTS of white space, good detail, funny and sad
Review:
One star is taken off because this book has way too much white space--125 pages of text stretched to 372.
It is a good thing to see this book ranking at this time as #1 in Amazon sales. America *needs* to read this book because the Republic has lost its soul--only by reading about reality and then voting accordingly, can this Republic be saved. I recommend the book be read together with "Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq", and the much older but seminal work by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, "Manufacturing Consent: The Polical Economy of the Mass Media." The bottom line is clear: there is a constellation of power in America that integrates the incumbents of the White House right now, the mass media, and the major corporate interests--oil, electrical and water utilities, finance, fast food and military systems--that is both corrupt and using blatant lies to get their way with the public. As I have personal experience with a certain class of people whose worldview is shaped by the Pat Robertson 700 Club, intense readings of the Bible in isolation from global realities, and a deep, deep feeling that America is perfect and anyone who does not agree is a traitorous moron, I really have to commend Franken for the humorous but well documented manner in which he skewers both the "front fluff" (Ann Coulter, Bernie Goldberg, Bill O'Reilly, Paul Gigot, and the entire Fox "News" Team) and the "backroom mean" (George Bush Junior, Mama Bush--aka in the book from several sources, "Queen Bitch"--and the really really dangerous and unethical Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Richard Perle, and Paul Wolfowitz) as well as the lesser evils--Rumsfeld chief among them). The author's use of transcripts for "hard fact" documentation is superb, as are the endnotes. Indeed, the truths that he uses as his raw working material are so powerful that I found some of his satirical untruths or exaggerations to be off-putting--either they should be clearly marked (even put in little boxes so the publishers can add another 25 pages and charge even more for the paperback version) or even eliminated. Put bluntly, this book has so much important stuff to communicate, that the satiracal untruths detract from the value of the endeavor. The book should have an index. I wanted to look up all references to Dick Cheney and could not. Special for Fox "News" devotees: If you read just one book *other* than the Bible, this is the one for you. It just might shake you out of your death grip on a cocaine-based, crime-based presidency, and allow you to consider the possibility that all Americans--including those in la-la-land--need to wake up to the difference between manufactured lies and real-world truths that will determine the future of our children and our grand-children. God is *not* amused by the present state of affairs. He just told me so, himself, right after telling Dubya his time is up.
Rating:
Summary: A screed against the Screechy Right
Review: There's nothing funnier than watching the Fascist Right scream and howl when hoisted by their own petard, although that's not really what's happening here. Always antischolar, the racuous Right has taken to publishing books laced with pseudo-research, ghosted by Murdock hacks and breathlessly reviewed on Fox News, the fopish Rubublican house organ.
Conservative authors are justifiably confident in their readership's inability to know a footnote from a endnote (right Ann?) much less actually read and research one. This makes it possible for conservatives to annotate patent falsehoods and give them an air of "authority", based on the belief of dittoheads and other smooth-lobed bipeds that anything so annotated must be verified. Attend, for instance, Al Franken's ability to easily expose the convoluted, mawkish errors in a Reagan fiscal chart published by Sean Hannity, who knows Eleven Things. P.T. Barnum made millions off of Conservatives.
This is one of the reasons why the work of Al Franken is so important. He explores the sources of these Conservative hate screeds and finds--surprise, surprise--that they have the air-tight integrity of a sieve. Watch closely. As the glazed-eyed, gape-mouthed Limbaugh fans log in en masse to pan a book they refuse to buy or read, they will not refute a single point Franken makes, but will resort to pathos-filled rhetoric and supersimplified dismissals. Why be surprised? Conservatism does not, after all, elicit thought. Anger and hate are enough.
Rating:
Summary: ad hominem attacks?
Review: A 1-star reviewer writes on October 21, "Ask yourself what kind of idiot would risk dragging his family into this arena of mudslinging and ad hominem attacks?" Isn't it ironical that the reviewer calls Al Franken an "idiot" and then claims that Franken is resorting to "ad hominem attacks"?! That's not all, the reviewer also says that Franken is a "loser", "nutcase", and "small-minded". "Lies" exposes such double-standards of the Conservatives throughout the book. For instance, here's Franken's observation of Ann Coulter:
------
Coulter believes that the rules don't apply to her. Anything she accuses the liberals of doing, she can do herself, in spades. Take her chapter, "The joy of arguing with Liberals: You're Stupid!". The premise: "If liberals were prevented from ever again calling Republicans dumb, they would be robbed of half their arguments....This is how six-year-olds argue: They call everything 'stupid'."
Let's look at some of the arguments this grown-up makes.
* Christie Whitman is a "birdbrain".
* Katie Couric is "an airhead".
* Adlai Stevenson was "a boob".
* Gerald Ford was "a little dumb"
* New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson is "truly stupid".
------ 'nuff said! This is a great book!
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, funny and provocative
Review: A brilliant read from beginning to end. Al Franken packs his book with hilarious anecdotes about the likes of Paul Wolfowitz, Tucker Carlson and, of all people, Barbara Bush. Moreover, he's not afraid to laugh at himself -- a lovely and rare quality among political commentators. Just as admirable is his ability to poke gentle fun at those who don't necessarily share his ideology (the chapter on Bob Jones University is hilarious and strangely affectionate and touching) and actually maintain genuine friendships with the most conservative of individuals (who would ever have guessed that he'd be friends with Gary Bauer??). But make no mistake. This is a serious-minded book about serious subjects. It's beautifully documented and analyzed. His critics would be very hard pressed to find inaccuracies or embellishments. Speaking of his critics, it's so patently obvious that those individuals who gave it a low rating haven't in fact read it (does a single one of them actually cite *anything* from the book? I think not). That's a pity. They could learn something, share some good humour, and have a good time along the way. I highly recommend this book. Anyone who can count an Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly or George W Bush fan among his or her immediate family or circle of friends should purchase this book for that person and MAKE HIM OR HER READ IT. Or better, read it aloud to them and watch the hilarity ensue.
Rating:
Summary: All yall rating this one star are no doubt....
Review: a bunch of right wing morons who listen to Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reily. I've read alot of you saying Franken provides no facts for what he says, which is a total bunch of BS. In most cases he tells how he come upon his info, which paper it was in et cetera. How bout you get off your ass, go to www.lexisnexus.com and check the facts he says instead of relying on Bill and Rush to tell you its a lie, find out for yourself for once. Usually I would just give htis book 3 or 4 stars, but because of all the people on here rating it one star for no other reason than that they are dumbasses, I bumped it up a bit.
Rating:
Summary: you won't be able to put it down
Review: a definite page turner. this book has so many damning facts that you almost can't process the laundry list of things wrong with america's right. al franken has some good humor here, but the research findings alone make it worth the read. thank you, mr. al franken.
Rating:
Summary: Best book of the year
Review: A fantastic book. A welcome dose of reality for anyone who's weary of being assaulted on all sides by today's ubiquitous, corporate-funded right-wing blowhards. "Lies and the Lying Liars..." is both wickedly funny and brilliantly insightful. It totally and completely demolishes one right-wing lie after another. I wonder if any thinking adult will ever take the Republicans seriously again.
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