Al Franken: Lies And The Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair And Balanced Look At The Right

Al Franken's last two books have failed to replicate the power or impact of his 1996 bestseller Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fat Idiot, a self-explanatorily titled demolition of the radio icon, among others. After the uneven but amusing Why Not Me?, an account of Franken's fictional run for president, he returned with Oh, The Things I Know!, a slim how-to success guide that didn't exactly inflame the author/comedian's passions. The quality of his books, while uneven, has gotten pretty easy to predict: The more Franken cares about his subject, the better the result. While taking aim at a succession of juicy, Limbaugh-esque targets (the Fox News Channel, Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, and an assortment of conservative politicians and insiders), Franken's new Lies And The Lying Liars Who Tell Them directs his most stinging barbs at the right-wing media, from O'Reilly's blustery self-aggrandizement to Coulter's shrill mean-spiritedness and shoddy research. But as Lies progresses beyond debunking the notion of "the liberal media," Franken shifts his focus to policy and history, with somewhat less consistent results. He repeats a device that didn't work especially well in Big Fat Idiot (an overlong fictional account of what might have happened had today's warmongers been yesterday's soldiers), while his fawning praise of Bill Clinton and Al Gore employs a bit of revisionism, and his statistics sometimes prove slippery, the way only statistics can do. It's frustrating that Franken neglects to point a finger at the Democrats' own widespread timidity, and he never acknowledges how absurd it is that the party's most effective and outspoken attack dog (besides maybe James Carville) is an affable Saturday Night Live veteran. But Lies' shortcomings are overwhelmed by the book's heady mixture of scathing humor and righteous indignation, with the latter dominating a wrenching account of the days following U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone's death. For every digression that doesn't work, there are several that do, especially a comic-book treatment of "Supply Side Jesus" and an ill-conceived undercover expedition to Bob Jones University, in which Franken makes the mistake of assuming that no one there would recognize him. Unfortunately, the best story surrounding Lies–the hilariously counterproductive lawsuit Fox News filed to prevent the book's use of the trademarked phrase "Fair And Balanced"–will have to wait for the paperback edition, which means Franken will soon get to profit from the incident even more than he already has. If that isn't the definition of getting the last laugh, what is?