Al Franken

Lying has become acquiesced to, if not actually embraced, in American politics and culture. Franken’s by now infamous book is laugh-out-loud funny throughout the first half and (refreshingly!) does not contain a single lie. Granted sanction by Harvard University to write any book while in residency, he assembled 14 grad-student fact-checkers to help him write his screed refuting the myth of the “liberal” media and to pop the putrid bubbles of such conservative pundits as Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity, all of whom are impaled on their swords of documented lies. Disappointingly, the last third of the book seems an afterthought (I stopped laughing), undercutting the knockout blow that should have come with a climax showcasing Bush’s Iraq lies. Incongruously, Franken (a capital ‘D’ Democrat) admits that he actually bought Bush’s lies about weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the war. Huh?