Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right

"Grown-up love means actually understanding what you love, taking the good with the bad and helping your loved one grow.”
― Al Franken, Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right

4.5 stars.

I guess one's enjoyment of this depends on how much they like Al Franken.

This was the first book I’ve read by him and I found it to be a warm, human and utterly hilarious read. Al takes on FOX News in this this book, in particular Bill O’Reilly.

This book has a very interesting back story as supposedly Fox News sued Franken in court over the words "Fair and Balanced" which I find to be utterly hysterical. And yes it is discussed in the book.

I suppose I can see why conservatives might get pissed off at this book but show more even if you’re not an ultra liberal this does make for fun reading.

Franken brings up a lot of things that are really on point. George Bush was president when this came out. Franken brings his wit through the book, to be sure, but the thing is: lots of stuff in this book make so much sense. I loved his "Lawyer and the waitress" story.

I personally love reading political nonfiction books to get all viewpoints and I happen to be a fan of Franken. If you are seeking a good political Non Fiction book, this is a great one AND there is nothing about Trump because he was a long way from being president when this came out. (Sigh..resisting the urge to say something Snarky about now).

Whatever your views on Franken, he is not and never has been, boring. And he just makes one laugh while at the same time making you think. I would give this 4.5 stars. Highly recommended. show less

"Grown-up love means actually understanding what you love, taking the good with the bad and helping your loved one grow.”
― Al Franken, Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right

4.5 stars.

I guess one's enjoyment of this depends on how much they like Al Franken.

This was the first book I’ve read by him and I found it to be a warm, human and utterly hilarious read. Al takes on FOX News in this this book, in particular Bill O’Reilly.

This book has a very interesting back story as supposedly Fox News sued Franken in court over the words "Fair and Balanced" which I find to be utterly hysterical. And yes it is discussed in the book.

I suppose I can see why conservatives might get pissed off at this book but show more even if you’re not an ultra liberal this does make for fun reading.

Franken brings up a lot of things that are really on point. George Bush was president when this came out. Franken brings his wit through the book, to be sure, but the thing is: lots of stuff in this book make so much sense. I loved his "Lawyer and the waitress" story.

I personally love reading political nonfiction books to get all viewpoints and I happen to be a fan of Franken. If you are seeking a good political Non Fiction book, this is a great one AND there is nothing about Trump because he was a long way from being president when this came out. (Sigh..resisting the urge to say something Snarky about now).

Whatever your views on Franken, he is not and never has been, boring. And he just makes one laugh while at the same time making you think. I would give this 4.5 stars. Highly recommended. show less

Personally I didn’t find the book funny and kept thinking that this sort of intense satire might actually facilitate ignoring real problems. The author amplifies the distance between everyday views and the incumbent. Somehow it seems logical that the response from an angry right would be to care even less and try to trample the values of this satirical “left”.

Satire works best when it creates new ideas that are not so overtly partisan, rather capture something human and universal.

This book is three times as long as it needs to be and lacks any organizing principle. The jokes range from the unnoticeable to the puerile. Franken does well to call out the lies of the republican administration and conservative talking heads, and the forward, in which he thanks god and explains that god told him to write the book, is nice. But the book goes downhill really fast.

I have yet to find a modern political satirist whose satire really bites, someone who can do for contemporary politics what Gibbon did for the Roman Empire. I'ld settle for someone who was willing to try.

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
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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. Franken 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 show more 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. show less

Extremely funny and - although it takes an extreme in-your-face liberal bias - extremely informative! A very quick and easy read, with plenty of comedy tossed in with the serious evidence of lies the right makes. Al Franken is my new hero!


(I also just feel like I have to menition the humor that Franken writes in and make the reader aware of it. It's not flat-out, here's a joke so laugh at it kind of humor. It takes a little thought process, as sometimes a joke or punchline or funny comment is thrown in the text to make it sound as if it's just another fact., but it's really not true. I'll admit, sometimes it may be a little confusing to the reader so if you don't have the same sense of humor as Franken does, you might find yourself show more going "huh?" at times. However, if you do, then I can assure you when you're reading it, you will think it's the funniest book ever written). show less

It's preaching to the choir--I mean who else is going to read it? but I loved every scathing word of it. Franken delivers facts with incredibly fine humor and tidy scholarship.