Rating: 
Summary: Reading the other side...
Review: This material can be dry if written by most political authors. Franken makes it humorous and enjoyable; along with extremely enlightening. I highly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: Must reading
Review: This may be a little partisan (OK, really partisan), but it's also very well researched and fascinating. Dump W in '04!
Rating:
Summary: A book of facts
Review: This points out and cites cases where Coulter, O'Riley and company have blatantly lied and misconstrued data to prove points. Coulter even cites book reviews as New Your Times Editorials!I can not believe how many people claim to hate this book after not reading it. One such disgruntled reviewer claims that political books should only be written my college graduates, and not Franken. This only proves Franken's point because Franken is a graduate of Harvard. (http://www.alfrankenweb.com/harvard.html)
Rating:
Summary: This is my 2nd Review on this book!
Review: This review is aimed at certain other reviewers, who are claiming that Franken lied in his book. These people are GRASPING AT STRAWS PEOPLE!! In the chapter Abstinence Heroes, Franken displays a letter he sent to different abstinence education advocates, in which he says that he is writing a book called Savin' it and wanted each person to write back and give a story in which they were tempted to have sex but because of their beliefs said no. Bare in mind that he sent this letter to people such as Newt Gingrich, and Pat Robertson, and then signed the letter with HIS OWN NAME (showing that he wasn't hiding anything).
Anyone who read this letter would have seen it for what it was: A JOKE. OF course, being Franken, it also had some merit. For all the people who stand so strongly against sexual education in school, not one of the 27 people he sent the letter to had an experience where they turned down the opportunity of sex because of their morals (at least not one they shared).
What irritates me is that certain conservative reviewers are bitter about Franken's success, his book, and the lies he exposes within it. Therefore, these individuals take something like this letter, which is obviously a farce (a very funny one at that) and tries to say that Franken was lieing. Seriously, he said he had a chapter within the book called "Role Modelin it." That's hillarious!!! And no one can say that when Ashcroft and Lott and every other person who received the letter looked down and saw it was signed by Al Franken that they didn't get the joke. Even if they missed every other obvious clue and jest then in the end when they saw it signed by Franken they would KNOW!!!! Finally, I'd like to end with a quote by our lovable genuis. "If you think you've found something that rings untrue, you've probably just missed a hilarious joke, and should blame yourself rather than me or Teamfranken." (XIV) GET IT NOW?
Rating: 
Summary: another book
Review: This reviewer reviewed his previous book "Oh, the Things I Know." What was said there, still holds..Why is it so popular? Amusement is a big part of it. People want the relaxation of amusement in a world which goes from tension to tension.
Rating: 
Summary: Get some new material
Review: This should be listed as fiction.
How funny that in a book about liars Al Franken himself tells so many lies. I'm glad that I borrowed this book and didn't spend money on it.
Oh, and get over the O'Reilly thing! Bill O'Reilly once misspoke on the name of an award that "Inside Edition" had won and, although O'Reilly has corrected the mistake numerous times, Franken keeps using that example as "proof" that O'Reilly is a liar-never acknowledging that he corrected himself.
Franken is, in fact, so desperate to attract attention that he has not only named his radio show to mimic "The O'Reilly Factor"
but he has recently gone on "The Howard Stern Show" which I was a fan of for years until Stern became a pathetic old man who no longer thinks for himself.
Anyways, I'm sure that this review won't be helpful to most of
the sad people who are blindly believing Al Franken's lies.
He almost makes me ashamed to be a democrat.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant
Review: This thoroughly researched, sharply funny and insightful gem is well worth the cover price. It's Al Franken at his best, providing a critical, intelligent, and humorous look at the way conservatives and this administration continually flood the American public with sweeping generalizations, ad-hominem attacks,half-truths, and complete untruths about, well, just about everything! I laughed out loud...when I wasn't crying for America.
Rating:
Summary: Not balanced but accurate
Review: This very funny but extremely serious book goes after the deliberate falsehoods perpetrated by the right-wing on "liberals."
As you may know, the Fox Network went after Franken for trademark infringement because he used the phrase "fair and balanced." The judge threw out the suit as completely ludicrous and made several trenchant comments about the inability of the Fox executives to recognize satire when they saw it
.
Harvard University gave Franken a fellowship to basically do whatever he wanted, but demurred at his idea of having Harvard students write his son's college application, but Harvard demurred. He finally hit upon the idea of having a group of students do research for his book. They bought the idea. His first target is Ann Coulter, author of Scandal. Franken methodically picks apart her book, revealing it for the inaccurate, if not disingenuous, piece of nonsense it is. He also shows how she has blatantly lied about things. Her Connecticut driver's license shows her birth date as 1961; her Washington DL says 1963. She claims the Washington DL is correct, which means she voted as a sixteen-year-old. On one of the applications she lied about her age. Now, many people have done that, but since the US Patriot Act makes it a felony to put false information on a government ID, she could be whisked away and held without counsel for a long time. I wish they would. Simple charges she makes in her book were never checked. For example, she complains that Evan Thomas, supposedly one of those heinous liberals, was the son of Norman Thomas, four-time [sic] candidate for president on the Socialist party ticket. Actually, he ran six times, and a simple phone call to Evan Thomas reveals that he is not the son of Norman Thomas. Coulter's book is filled with such false details. Either she is extremely lazy or a blatant liar. Franken obviously suspects the latter. Francken has infuriated that scion of right-wing Fox Bill O'Reilly by publicly pointing out many untruths that O'Reilly has put forth. At Book Expo in Los Angeles, O'Reilly was humiliated by Franken, who categorically listed all sorts of lies O'Reilly had perpetrated on the public. Now, Franken makes clear that occasionally making a mistake on a statistic is hardly a crime, but O'Reilly's customary tactic, when challenged with the correct information from unimpeachable sources is to simply bully and yell at his challenger rather than correct the mistake. The problem is also that he makes lots of mistakes. More from the "sewer of right-wing dishonesty. When he interviewed the son of a worker killed on 9/11 on February 4th, 2003, he became enraged at the son's opposition to the war in Iraq, had his engineer cut off the man's microphone, and sent him packing saying to him after the show's end, "Get out of my studio before I tear you to f*cking pieces." O'Reilly, who constantly rails at the lyrics of rap songs, wrote a murder mystery in 1998, Those who Trespass (about a serial killer who murders everyone who interferes with his rising television career), that took explicit sex and violence to new heights and the English language to new lows. In one murder, the victim is killed by having a spoon driven through the roof of her mouth into her brain stem. Variants of the "F" word and "B" word are used more than 51 times. Case of the pot calling the kettle black? O'Reilly is not a nice man. Team Franken took a look at Hannity's (of Hannity and Colmes,) book to verify the factualness of his statements. Examples of disingenuousness and dishonesty abound. Bush's initial indifference to al Qaeda prior to 9/11 is astonishing. The Clinton administration had developed plans for eliminating Bin Laden, but those plans were ignored. That the Bin Laden family were good friends with the Bush family is well-known, and Franken speculates as to what might have happened to Clinton had he been so nice to the Bin Laden family, permitting a Saudi plane to fly around the country picking up family members for return to Saudi Arabia, while American airplanes were grounded. In the meantime, President Bush has broken all presidential records for the number of days spent on vacation. The book is often uneven, some parts funnier and some more serious. Should one laugh or cry learning that many of our leaders today, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle, Bush, and other chickenhawks who are sending men off to die in war, did everything in their power, having their fathers pull strings and inventing flimsy excuses (shouldn't pick on Limbaugh, I think he was just too fat) to avoid service in Vietnam.
Rating:
Summary: Unnecessary and Disgusting
Review: This vitriol will not win elections. Thank goodness this guy speaks for the same vocal MINORITY who dress like hippies and attend sit-ins at UC Berkeley.
Rating:
Summary: Great read.
Review: This was a fun book to read. Franken is scrupulous with his details, and does a great job of showing just how sloppy so much of the right-wing propoganda out there really is. If you haven't read this book yet, get to it!
|
