Truthiness

In case you didn't pick up on it from his early books (Rush Limbaugh Is A Big, Fat Idiot and Other Observations and Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced View of the Right), Al Franken really doesn't like the modern conservative movement. Who can blame him?

His latest, The Truth (with Jokes), aims to debunk the wisdom circulating in the immediate aftermath of the 2004 election, namely that America had turned sharply to the right and embraced the extreme right-wing view touted by Bush, Limbaugh, et al.

And, he does a reasonable job with this mission, pointing out the many blunders, deceptions and outright lies used to spin the election results in such a way. There is a good bit of empirical weight behind most of Franken's assertions (except for the jokes - but at least they're funny), so while it's certainly not a scholarly tome (again, the jokes are important), it feels less like a soapbox rant.

Still, nothing Franken wrote struck me as terribly earth shattering. Then again, I'm probably better informed than the average American, even though I feel underinformed on much of what's happening in the world. (To wit: I only discovered that postage rates had risen over the weekend thanks to an oblique reference to it in an NHL column Monday.) Thus, even though I found Franken's book highly entertaining (the lies Franken makes up about Sean Hannity are hilarious, such as his bogus claim that Hannity doesn't find anything wrong with getting drunk and urinating in mailboxes), it didn't strike me as some great exposé. (Of course, the chapter exposing what sleazeballs Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay are seemed especially salient, though maybe this is because I didn't really follow that story until DeLay got sacked as majority leader late last year.)

And one current that bothered me a bit was the unmitigated love Franken has for the Clinton administration. Clinton looms large as Bush's foil, and the Clinton presidency as a whole stands as the model of progress in Franken's view.

I'd have preferred a more critical, or at least slightly less fawning assessment of the Clinton years. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to dislike Clinton (doing nothing during the Rwanda genocide and slashing welfare come to mind), but you wouldn't know that Clinton was fallible from reading Franken.

And then there's also his wholly sympathetic portrait of John Kerry. Let's not delude ourselves into thinking a Kerry victory would've changed things radically. Not unless Kerry, deep down, really is the sort of pinko-liberal the right-wing mudslingers claimed he was. But somehow I doubt that.

Then again, maybe this is just symptomatic of a greater flaw with the mainstream liberal movement. Namely that it's too, well, mainstream. There's not a lot in the Democratic platform, at least not in the ones hyped in the last two presidential elections, to excite the troops. Clinton could compensate for that with his legendarily electric personality, but Gore and Kerry affected all the verve of lox.

So while Franken's read might make you chuckle aloud on the bus, it probably won't fundamentally shift anyone's worldview.