Believe it or not I really did enjoy reading this book. The premise of it, in my opinion, is that Al Franken and his Harvard-financed rag-tag team of hand-picked Republican haters (hereafter called TeamFranken) set out to show that any popular political pundit who criticizes Democrats has lied, and because of this we should never believe anything they say. His main targets are Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, the Bush administration, and Bill O'Reilly. Along the way he smacks around Bernard Goldberg and Fox News. For the most part he does point out some pretty suspect behavior.

Since Franken was a writer for Saturday Night Live, the book was funny, in a satirical way. Toward the end of the book though, TeamFranken breaks from their theme and starts in on why the GOP stole the election, why Clinton was the greatest President, and why all things liberal are way better than all things conservative. For me this was where he lost his credibility. While I didn't feel like fact-checking every piece of information in the book, there were some items (the election and Iraq come to mind) that have been hashed and re-hashed so much that even I could see that TeamFranken were the ones lying and misleading. Also Bernard Goldberg does a much better job of pointing out problems with the MAINSTREAM media being liberally slanted in his book than TeamFranken could even begin to refute. Franken spent much of their time bashing the Washington Post, FoxNews, and the Wall Street Journal.

It was entertaining to see his attack on Bob Jones University backfire. He basically lied to them about being interested in enrolling his nephew there. He does say they were very friendly and not too threatening with their ideals. But that doesn't stop him from trying to tie the University's founder to Nazi Germany by way of some valuable campus art. Of course the reason he tells the Bob Jones story is to point out that to be a good liar you must be really mean and have no ethics or morals. He therefore is not a good liar. He is a liberal, and liberals are good.

A lot of the rest of the topics included Barbara Bush, the Wellstone memorial, the tone in Washington, the environment, racism, education, and weapons of mass destruction. Franken's issues with these topics may have some truth behind them, but in my opinion, his complaints all boil down to politics. Both sides are going to massage statistics and subtly mislead people to get votes. I didn't put much stock in these rants. As Franken himself says (twice), "statistics don't lie". But you CAN interpret them to suit your argument.

At the end of the day, though, this was a Republican bashing book in much the same vein as a Hannity or Coulter book. Read this book if you're a member of the choir.

Home | Book List | Book Reviews