He has also penned his liberal thinking in a pair of poor-selling books: “Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them” and the recently released followup “The Truth”.
Judging by the titles, these might seem to be topics worthy of the effort. Only problem is that in “Lies”, Franken tells many himself, both of omission and commission, and in “Truth”, he tells very little of it.
Instead, Franken chooses to slant particular stories and comments of his targets, almost exclusively President Bush and his Republican allies, to suit his desired result. Great examples are highlighted at the website frankenlies.com.
For instance, in attacking Fox News pundit and my 2005 website American of the Year Bill O’Reilly in “Lies”, Franken claims that O’Reilly lies when he continually makes statements of being proud to have been raised in Levittown, Long Island, New York. Franken states that O’Reilly is not from Levittown, but from the “affluent suburb of Westbury”, which he further states as being “several miles apart” from Levittown.
O’Reilly, always the actual purveyor of truth, responded on his own Fox program “The O’Reilly Factor” in April of 2004 by showing his parents actual deed from the home, in which his mother still lived, clearly showing the Levittown designation.
When Franken brought on to his radio program a Hofstra professor and Levittown expert, Barbara Kelly, he was told there was no lie to uncover, that O’Reilly had indeed grown up in Levittown.
Truth – 1, Franken – 0
The fact is, this is a small matter, but it highlights a theme that runs throughout both of the books.
Distortions and manipulations of the truth by Franken in order to smear those who he perceives as being against his liberal agenda, or to at least knock them down a peg, compounded by obviously shoddy research from his assistants, leave the only impression that one can take away from the books as being that the agenda they are driving at is anything but what the title of the books implies.
Franken himself is lying right in his own books titles. “Lies” does not expose the lies of lying liars. “Truth” does not tell the truth. Both books do, however, take uneven, manipulative, easily debunked swipes at moderates and conservatives.
Both books prove to be a waste of money to all but two types of individuals: those who live by his same liberal agenda, and want to have their fires stoked, and those who want to pick his statements apart. The latter would be better served by taking the books out of the public library, thus keeping Franken from receiving monetary gain from these wasted efforts.
Truth is something that we all know about. You steal money from your mom’s purse, she notices it missing, she asks who took it, you say “I’m sorry, mom, I took it.” Outright lies are something we all know about. You steal money from your mom’s purse, she notices it missing, she asks who took it. You did, but you point at your brother and say “Billy took it, mom, I saw him.” Pretty cut and dry.
Lies come in all shades and colors. There are big lies and little lies. A big lie would be, for instance, murdering someone and when confronted about it, denying it, and doing so repeatedly in court, ala O.J. Simpson. Then there are little lies. You borrow your brother’s music CD, lose it, and when he asks where it is you say “I don’t know.”
There are lies we tell ourselves, such as “I’m not really that much overweight.” There are lies we tellout of vanity, such as being asked how old we are and, when we know we are 40 years old, saying “29”. There are lies we tell out of embarrassment. You know, the roomful of friends where someone has passed gas, and an offendee remarks “Oh, man, who did that?”
Then there are the kinds of lies that may seem trivial on the outside, but actual cause much harm due to the circumstances. For instance, one of Franken’s best buddies, former president Bill Clinton, lying under oath in a formal proceeding that he “did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky!” We all know how that one turned out, with impeachment proceedings and the tarnishing of our national reputation.
There are lies of commission, such as in the current political scandal involving lobbyist Jack Abramoff. “This is a Republican scandal”, said Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid on Fox News Sunday. Radical DNC chairman Howard Dean echoed on CNN that “Every person named in this scandal is a Republican. Every person under investigation is a Republican. Every person indicted is a Republican. This is a Republican finance scandal.”
Fact is, er, should I say, truth is, Mr. Reid himself leads a list of dozens of Democrats directly linked to the lobbying scandal, having received $61,000 in campaign contributions from Abramoff clients.
Yet, unlike many Republican lawmakers who, when they found out the ties that Abramoff had to organizations that donated to them, Mr. Reid refuses to return the money or donate it to charity. All this is well known to both Reid and Dean as they attempt to use their allies in the liberal mass media news outlets to take the heat off the lying Democrats in this bipartisan scandal.
Then there are lies of omission, such as not telling the full truth, or of telling some of the truth, just enough that you cannot be permanently tainted by it’s likely consequences. This would include incidents like the performance of Senator Edward Kennedy after the death of his aide, Mary Jo Kopechni, at Chappaquidik.
Kennedy spun a now widely-revealed tall tale, which was too eagerly embraced by the media thanks largely to it’s own hoped-for vision of a return to the idealistic “Camelot” days of his brothers under Teddy’s stewardship.
Or more recently by the Democratic standard-bearer Kennedy in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the nomination of judge Sam Alito to the U.S. Supreme Court, when Kennedy brought up Alito’s membership during the 1980’s in the group Concerned Alumni of Princeton (CAP). Kennedy stated in the hearings “Explanations about the membership in this sort of radical group…are extremely troubling…I don’t think that they add up.”
In fact, the now-defunct CAP group was anything but radical, unless you are looking at things from the perspective of the most liberal minds.
Dinesh D’Souza, a native of India and a best-selling author began his career as editor of CAP’s magazine in 1983, and states “It was a respected mainstream conservative organization” and pointed out that it was founded in 1972 by Princeton graduates seeking to expose a dominance of liberal ideas on the campus. Hardly the stuff of a “radical group”, as Mr. Kennedy would have us believe.
Of course, there is the “Big Lie” as well. You know, the one that everyone knows is going on, or has been told, but no one either can prove or wants to talk about. At least not yet. For the liberal Dems and their big media mouthpieces, that big one was told by President Bush when he took our troops into Iraq to rid that country of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.
Let’s go over that idea in a simplistic paragraph. Your wife comes home and tells you that her car engine is “knocking”. You get your neighbor, the certified mechanic, to come over after dinner and take a look at it. He tells you that it appears that the whatchamacallit is busted, an inexpensive job.
You report the damaged whatchamacallit and it’s minor price tag to repair back to your wife.
Now, she takes the car to her mechanic the next day, and after a thorough examination he tells her that the whatchamacallit is just fine, but the thingamajig is in need of replacement, and it is gonna be expensive. She phones you and calls you a liar, and says that not only will you have to pay for the repairs out of your pocket, but that in fact you will have to leave the house, because she cannot live with someone who would lie to her.
The United States is attacked, with thousands of citizens murdered and multi-millions in structural and monetary damages suffered, not to mention the damage inflicted on the nation’s collective psyche, by radical Islamofascist middle eastern terrorists. You find they are being trained in Afghanistan.
You go over there and set things straight, then are told by experts that an Afghani regional neighbor, Iraq, and it’s tyrannical leader Saddam, already having used chemical weapons against his own people, has weapons of mass destruction that are likely to be used against Americans in the near future.
You detour part of your war effort into Iraq to take care of this already out of control problem before it becomes yet another tragedy to your country. You have already stated after the massive attack against your people that you will combat terrorists and evil-doers wherever they may be, including whomever may be offering them safe haven.
You receive the full, formal backing of your Congress, and the public support of your people in this effort. You go into Iraq, remove the tyrant, and begin to transform a 2nd nation into a bastion of freedom-loving democracy. Oh, by the way, in doing so none of those weapons of mass destruction are found. May have been hidden, or moved, or otherwise disposed of, but they are not there now.
You are a liar, and over 2,000 American sons and daughters have been slaughtered in fighting this war that was based on your lies.
At least that is how the radical, liberal Democrats and their like-thinking, politically biased established media conglomerates at places like CNN, CBS and the New York Times, among many other allegedly mainstream outlets, continually report it.
Truth is, you did exactly what you said you would do after your nation was attacked. You went after terrorists and the nations that supported, trained and harbored them. The al Qaeda-Iraq connections, so long written off as more lies by the left, are now being fully revealed as our intelligence forces get to sift through the voluminous documents confiscated in the Iraq invasion.
Truth is, you did exactly what you said you would do when you took your oath of office as the President of the United States, to preserve, protect and defend your nation. But to lefties such as Al Franken, Ted Kennedy, Howard Dean, Harry Reid, Dan Rather, and Ted Koppel, you are a liar, and they are the purveyors and protectors of truth.
Fact is, we are all liars, in that we have all told them, and likely will tell them again. Whether it be a little white lie to avoid embarrassment, or a big lie to avoid repercussions, we will all be forced to make that decision at one time or another, and will all come up short from time to time.
But on the biggest issues of our time, if you watch beyond the talking heads of the “established” networks, and read beyond the “established” publications, you can find the real truth. You will find it in our President, George W. Bush, and you absolutely will find it with our 2005 American of the Year, Bill O’Reilly.
But you will almost never find truth with radicals such as Ted Kennedy, Howard Dean, or self-proclaimed “Lies” and “Truth” expert Al Franken.
And that’s the God’s-honest truth.
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