Franken's satirical Lies (9/12)

By Bryan Keefer

Early on in his new book, Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them) - currently number one on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestsellers list - Al Franken argues for the importance of fact-checking:

[W]ith fourteen researchers, I could do something that my targets seems incapable of doing – get my facts straight. . . . Thanks to TeamFranken, you can rest assured that almost every fact in this book is correct. Either that, or it's a joke. If you think you've found something that rings untrue, you've probably just missed a hilarious joke, and should blame yourself rather than me or TeamFranken. (p. xiii-xiv)

For the most part, Franken does get his facts right. His deconstruction of Ann Coulter's Slander (which he notes relies in part on my review of Coulter's book for this site and Salon), is excellent, as is his evisceration of Sean Hannity and Let Freedom Ring.

At least one item, however, slipped by his staff of Harvard volunteers. In his chapter on President Clinton's record on terrorism, Franken erroneously claims that Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman wrote in a December 20, 2001 article that Clinton's was "the first administration to undertake a systematic anti-terror effort." (p. 110) In fact, that quote comes from Clinton National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, who told Gellman that "I think the Clinton administration was the first administration to undertake a systematic anti-terror effort – organizationally, in terms of resources and in terms of anti-terrorist activity." (Franken does correctly quote Gellman earlier in the paragraph).

The book includes thirteen pages of endnotes that document most of the facts the author uses (curiously, the book does not include an index). However, there are no direct indications of which endnotes support which facts. Ironically, Franken criticizes Coulter for using endnotes in Slander (Coulter actually does a better job of documenting her sources, carefully citing each point in the text with a numbered reference to an endnote).

While Franken laces his book with attacks on conservatives, such as facetiously declaring that his next book will be titled "I F*cking Hate Those Right-Wing Motherf*ckers!" (p. 107), most of his partisan rhetoric is clearly marked as sarcastic and satirical. That humor, however, often degenerates into name-calling: Ari Fleischer is a "chimp," (p. 341); Karl Rove is "human filth," (p. 151), Ashcroft covered up a statue in the Justice Department because "He didn't like being photographed in front of another boob" (p. 161).

Other parts of the book blur the line between humor and spin even further. For example, he characterizes Bush's anti-terror efforts prior to September 11 as "Operation Ignore" (this comes just after a chapter rehabilitating Clinton's record on terrorism and skewering conservative pundits for misrepresenting it). One such passage from the chapter of the same title illustrates how Franken hides behind satire to imply things than he can't prove:

Now, on August 6, CIA Director Tenet delivered a report to President Bush entitled "Al Qaeda Determined to Strike US." The report warned that al Qaeda might be planning to hijack airplanes. But the President was resolute: Operation Ignore must proceed as planned. He did nothing to follow up on the memo. (p. 120)

While Franken's facts are technically correct, and he is clearly being more than a bit satirical with the passage, he uses that humor to insinuate a much darker charge against the President. Another example comes later in the book, in a chapter entitled "Fun With Racism":

I'm not saying that all Republicans are racist or that all racists are Republican. That would be reprehensible overstatement, akin to something Ann Coulter might say. But if Ann were a Democrat, she would point out that, after years of declining under Clinton, black poverty is now on the increase... And she'd blame it all on Bush. She'd claims it was because of deliberate, overt racism, rather than his more general bias towards the already privileged. She might even say his tax cut is inherently racist...

But that's Ann. I personally would never accuse Bush's tax cuts of being racially motivated. I just think that, very generally speaking, they happen to hurt black people and help rich people. Who tend, again generally, to be white. That's all I'm saying. (p. 259)

While that may be all that Franken is saying, he's implying something much different, and more much inflammatory – a technique closer to some of Coulter's than Franken might like to admit.

Much of the book operates in this region between humor and outright distortion. Given Franken's stated dedication to getting his facts straight, one is left with the feeling that he is using his humor to imply things he can't honestly argue for.

For these reasons, Franken's work is much subtler than Coulter's fabrications or Michael Moore's inventions. It's not that he isn't funny (just as, at times, Coulter can be). Rather, it's the way in which Franken's humor sometimes becomes a stand-in for honest argument whenever he wants to make a particularly nasty point about conservatives. Rather than making things up out of whole cloth, Franken leaves them unsaid, hiding behind his humor. The more satirical parts of the book, funny as they may be to those of liberal political convictions, raise questions about their effect on our already polarized political discourse.

[Disclosure: Franken states on page 11 that our work was a source for his chapter on Ann Coulter's Slander, cites a piece by Brendan Nyhan debunking President Bush's "trifecta" claim that appeared on Salon.com and this site in an endnote on page 364, and includes us in a list of several websites he calls "great resources" in his acknowledgements on page 376.]

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9/12/2003 09:31:32 AM EST |

Bush distorts taxes and deficits once again (9/12)

By Ben Fritz

President Bush just can't seem to tell the truth about the impact of his tax cuts on the budget deficit.

Speaking in Kansas City last week about the economy, Bush uttered a remarkable phrase: "And the tax relief, which is stimulating economic growth, is a part of the deficit. It's about a quarter of the deficit."

It's remarkable because it's not even close to true, even using the number provided by the President's own Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

According to the recent mid-session review issued in July by OMB, the total cost in fiscal 2003 of tax cuts passed in 2001, 2002 and 2003 is $177 billion. The total deficit: $455 billion. That means tax cuts account for 39 percent of the deficit. Bush couldn't have been referring to the five-year deficit project by OMB either, as the tax cuts equal 63 percent of the cumulative $1.9 trillion deficit from 2003-2008.

Bush may have gotten the figure from the fact that tax cuts have accounted for about one quarter of the total change in OMB's budget estimate for this year - from a projection of a $334 billion surplus for fiscal 2003 made in April of 2001 to the $455 billion deficit estimate made in July of this year. But by saying tax cuts account for "about a quarter of the deficit," he is clearly implying that without tax cuts, we'd still have 75% of this year's estimated $455 billion deficit remaining. That isn't remotely true.

Sadly, asserting that tax cuts play little to no role in the budget deficit or that they will pay for themselves has been a frequent tactic of the Bush administration, despite overwhelming data to the contrary (including statements by the President's own economists).

As he often does, Bush also took the chance to observe that, "a married couple with two children and a household income of $40,000 have seen their federal income tax bill fall this year from $1,978 to $45." As we have mentioned here before, though, examples like this are quite unrepresentative of the actual tax reduction for most households, which is significantly lower.

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9/12/2003 12:32:19 AM EST |

Big Lies and little mistakes (9/9)

By Bryan Keefer

Joe Conason, a columnist for the New York Observer and Salon, has released a new book titled Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth, which he writes is intended to debunk "myths about liberalism (and conservatism)." However, Big Lies, currently ranked eighth on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list, also includes a number of factual errors. While they do not rise to the level of Ann Coulter's distortions and fabrications in her books Slander and Treason, Sean Hannity's in Let Freedom Ring, or Michael Moore's in Stupid White Men, they indicate a willingness to believe - and repeat - questionable details that fit the author's ideological disposition. (Read the whole column.)

9/9/2003 05:55:03 AM EST |

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