Rating: 
Summary: My Dog Franni
Review: This book is "not a memorial to Paul Wellstone". In fact, Chapter 25 must be a complete embarrassment to the children of Senator Wellstone, especially when they are associated with a vitriolic, cursing name-caller named Al Franken. But what's really embarrassing is his obsequious pandering in the 5 pages of Acknowledgements - he thanks dozens and dozens of DNC lapdogs because Al wants to be a player, not a washed-up comedian doing skits at ten-of-one in the morning. Al Franken is clearly the nobody on the playground to be picked last for the team. This probably explains his propensity to be threatened by beautiful Republican women such as Ann Coulter - he knows he never had and never will have a chance with a gorgeous woman. Instead, he's stuck with leftovers, so he needs to vent his rage, which he does quite well. The guy is on the edge. I don't know why Franken takes umbrage at the Chambliss / Cleland campaign - he should be proud of the dirty tricks in which he himself is so willing to engage! The writing reflects the person writing the book, i.e., "as the right was spreading filth, sleaze, and bile". Very good Mr. Franken, you do it well yourself!
Rating: 
Summary: Liberals will laugh. Conservatives will laugh and get mad.
Review: This book is a collection of commentaries on various aspects of the right wing, including the right's allegation of liberal bias, his "friend" (her word) Ann Coulter, the unaccredited Bob Jones University, and other topics. Some chapters are heavily documented, while others are more personal storytelling. Throughout, he keeps up a lively, comic tone.One chapter, available in Amazon's excerpt, comments on the right's allegation of liberal bias in news media. His contention is that the bias is toward sensationalism and avoidance of offense to news organizations' corporate parents -- in general toward making news profitable -- rather than any bias left or right. He points out that the media was in a feeding frenzy over the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, which fits the idea of ratings-motivated bias better than pro-liberal bias. He also contrasts media reaction to blunders in the first Gore-Bush debate in 2000. Gore's mistake was saying he had visited a disaster site with a FEMA director, when he had actually visited 17 other disaster sites with him but not that one. Bush's blunder was claiming, "By far, the vast majority [of a tax cut] goes to people at the bottom," when the bottom 60 percent got 14.7 percent of the cut. Franken wrote that Gore's slip-up drew widespread media commentary, while Bush's lie or mistake drew almost none; Franken speculated that the media took Bush as too stupid to deserve criticism on statistical details. He contends that the mainstream media, however strong their ratings bias may be, maintain a left-right balance. By contrast, he notes that the media includes a committed right wing branch, including Fox News, the editorial pages of the _Wall Street Journal_, and most talk radio. His position is that the right wing media goes beyond editorializing, and sometimes plainly lies, then accuses the mainstream media of liberal bias when their lies are exposed. His Ann Coulter chapter, also excerpted on Amazon, notes that she said she was "friendly with" Franken in an interview, although the entire extent of their acquaintance was being briefly introduced at a party, where he was polite to her. He examines her 780 footnotes, pointing out that they're actually endnotes, and finds that they often demonstrate her main text as misleading or baldly lying. He sticks to the comic tone, while showing that her endnotes are evidence that she's misrepresenting facts, and hiding the lies by putting them in endnotes, which few readers bother to examine. I also read his chapter about his visit to Bob Jones University, an unaccredited institution famous for its ban on interracial dating (only recently lifted), its strong enforcement of its vision of Christianity, and other ideologies. His visit was designed to test whether stories of its hostility toward other types of Christianity (such as Roman Catholicism), anti-Jewish attitudes, and racism were justified. With a college-age confederate, he visited the campus, pretending interest in the school, and saying that the student's mother admired the school's values. Surprisingly, no one recognized Franken as a television comic and author until near the end of the day. He said they had fun watching school officials squirm when asked about the school's lack of accreditation and absence in a book of quality schools. But their overall impression was that while the people they met seemed committed to a narrow-minded branch of Christianity, they were also constantly polite and often seemed genuinely nice. That surprised them; they had expected a campus full of hate. While the main focus of the book is debunking the claim of liberal media bias, and poking fun at the right wing branch of the media, he includes stories like the Bob Jones University visit that stray far from media issues, though still related to the right. He maintains a sense of humor throughout the book, and the book should be worth laughs even to people whose ideology he mocks. Liberals should enjoy the book a great deal, and conservatives should get a good laugh out of it too, even if they're infuriated at Franken's laughs at their leaders' expense. Liberals, buy the book, put some money in Franken's pocket, and get a good laugh. Conservatives, borrow the book, get mad at Franken for making fun of your heroes, and get a good laugh too. My impressions are based on reading only a few chapters of the book, which I did to compare five current political books. The others were _Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush's America_, by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose, _Dude, Where's My Country?_ by Michael Moore, _Who's Looking Out for You?_ By Bill O'Reilly, and _Slander: Liberal Lies about the American Right_ by Ann Coulter. This one and _Bushwhacked_ were the best of the bunch. This one funnier and more entertaining to read, but Ivins and Dubose's was more focused and heavier on detailed research. Moore's was mildly amusing, but heavy on name-calling and not nearly as fun as his movies. O'Reilly's seemed like little more than a compilation of his newspaper editorial columns, and was deadly boring -- like Moore, O'Reilly is much more effective on-screen than in print. Coulter's was by far the worst; it was little more than a lot of hateful name-calling, misleading footnotes, without even the sense of humor that made Moore's name-calling amusing.
Rating:
Summary: Lots of good research, and funny too.
Review: This book is a combination of humor and research regarding many of the heated political issues of our day. Parts of the book were hilarious, others enlightening, others depressing. Should you laugh or cry when you read that Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Tom DeLay, Bill Kristol, Rush Limbaugh and many others avoided military service in Vietnam based on flimsy excuses? The chapter on the Bush administration's complete indifference to the al Qaeda threat prior to 9/11 is mind-boggling. While plans for taking out Bin Laden (developed by the Clinton administration) were shuffled between desks at the White House, President Bush took the longest presidential vacation in 32 years. The write-up is humorous, the subject is sad. This book covers some major issues about our government and the media, in a way that true patriotic Americans might find enlightening.
Rating:
Summary: The proof is in the reviews
Review: This book is a devastating inditement of the right wing. The important point is that the book as well as being funny takes great care to stick to the facts and argument to make it points - rather than innuendo, assumption and slander. No doubt that in a book full of thousands of facts, one or two mistakes will slip through, but he makes astute and logical analyses of many of the most pressing issues of our political times. As if to prove his point, the 1 starred reviews on this site display the same hysterical rants as his targets. If you are a right-winger who believes everything Ann Coulter says then you will not enjoy this book, on the other hand if you are a patriot of intelligence(right wing or left wing) who cares about this country, then you must read this book and then you can make up your own mind.
Rating:
Summary: Don't be Deceived
Review: This book is a FICTION! A political satire. The only thing that comes close to TRUTH are a few words on the cover "Al Franken" and "Lies".
Rating: 
Summary: Am I really the first?
Review: This book is a funny but mild retort to the rightwingers among us.
Sure, Anne Coulter, Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly don't care a
fig about the facts (favorite quotation: Hannity says "I don't have
a lot of time to refute every fact here") but they hardly
compare with the threat posed by the supine media, the mandated
electronic (ie, corruptable, no permanent record, and provided
100% by rightwing corporations) balloting, and the complete
disinterest of Americans in the other 75% of humanity.
Rating:
Summary: Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balance
Review: This book is a hoot! You'll laugh every paragraph. You won't laugh if you're a Limbaugh lemming or think George Bush is honest. Rather than laugh you'll cringe at the well-documented web of deciet that has victimized you. Either way, a book of this type is overdue. What took you so long Al? Al, you've done your part to insure a brighter future for America.
Rating:
Summary: Al Fraken is a lying liar who tells lies
Review: This book is a joke. Al Franken is a joke. He wouldnt know fair and balanced if it walked up and slapped his idiot self in the face. Bill Clinton lied so much, I guess Fraken felt compelled to try to make up some lies about the right to get even. The guy obviously has some sort of small man's complex, and definitely has no brains to think with. He was a failure on SNL, so why stop the trend. This book blows, just like his other trash. Sorry AL, you are yet again a failure.
Rating:
Summary: Delightful
Review: This book is a joy to read. It's informative but also hilarious. Franken shows how the right wing has lied and continues to lie. He presents his arguements logically and uses facts and transcripts to support his claim. No one is spared, from media giants like Bill O'Rielly and Ann Coulter, to politicians like Bush and Chaney. Franken show what they really are, liars. This book is a great buy for anyone.
Rating:
Summary: Stealth lying at its best
Review: This book is a masterful work of lies. I myself checked on three sources Mr. Franken used and found that this book is more written with "facts" that Franken made up than real evidence. The only source, of the three, that even existed was a NY Times article which was quoting a web page of a fanatical leftist from San Francisco. The article was being used out of context to support an idea Mr. Franken conjured in his own head. Being a liberal I am outraged that Mr. Franken feels the need to lie in order to support liberal ideas. Please buy Alan Colmes book if you are looking for an intelligent, TRUTHFUL, liberally-based political book.
|
