Clowns and jokers
Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth. By Joe Conason. St. Martin's, 240 pp., $24.95
Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. By Al Franken. Dutton, 368 pp., $24.95.
Al Franken and Joe Conason are mad as hell and they're not going to take it anymore. With the aid of 14 Harvard students, Franken has researched the words and deeds of Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Condoleeza Rice, George W. Bush et al. and separated the wheat from the chaff (his book is heavy on the chaff, and very funny). Joe Conason takes a more analytical approach, dissecting the way in which conservatives and the commentators who love them have shaped public thinking about patriotism, tax cuts and deficits, family values, affirmative action and the presidential election of 2000. Both authors conclude (well, OK, it's their starting premise) that our political discussion of these and other issues has been manipulated by the hypocrisy, nastiness and downright mendacity of the political right. This is "point-counterpoint" without the interruptions, and with lots of documentation and footnotes.
The only problem with this frontal attack on the claims of the right is that 1) the right still gets to set the agenda and 2) a book devoted to refuting talk radio hosts can quickly get tedious--as, for example, when Franken tries to establish that Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter are more elitist than the liberals they like to accuse of elitism. This is the drawback of Franken's book, as funny as it is; much of it is devoted to his duels with various pundits and politicos.
The book's strength is his ability to zero in on the truth. The most powerful passages are those on economic issues (the irrelevance of most economic debates to those who are truly poor; the incredible wealth accumulated by those who have benefited from their political connections through what Conason calls "crony capitalism") and his conclusions about how lies, sound bites and selfishness have created "a worldview designed to comfort the comfortable and further afflict the afflicted." Good point.
