What a Maroooon!!
Posted on 11/08/2003 12:23:34 PM PST by Davis
All you people who have been assiduously saving small change, pennies, nickels, and such, in the hope of painlessly putting aside the wherewithal to buy Al Franken's book, Lies, etc., can quit now. Spend that money on a couple of beers, a hamburger, or a Snickers bar. The book is dreadful.
Rest assured, I haven't read it. I scrutinized the cover for a minute or two, glanced at the dust jacket, but I've only dipped into it here and there, a random sampling, see. Quite enough for me to make an informed judgment. Lies is a mess with no discernible structure. Its premise, obvious from the title, is that conservatives have come to hold the Presidency and Senate and the House of Representatives and dominate the media by lying. If only the people were told the truth, they'd boot the rascals out instanter.
Accordingly, Mr. Franken, who is reputed to be a comedian, with the assistance of thousands of graduate students at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, has stitched together snippets of dis and dat to prove his thesis. I was alerted by David Frum's valuable review to notice that Franken spent a full page tasking my friend Ann Coulter with having lied about one Evan Thomas, head of Newspeak's Washington bureau. Miss Coulter, in Treason, described this chap as the son of Norman Thomas, several times the presidential candidate of the Socialist party, USA.
Franken reports that he thought it wise to telephone Evan Thomas to find out whether his father was Norman Thomas. Evan Thomas responds that he is actually named Evan Thomas, Jr. His father is Evan Thomas, Sr. Franken bangs down his gavel triumphantly. Ann Coulter has been caught lying.
Apparently obeying some little-known civilian version of the military's don't ask-don't tell policy, Franken did not ask and Thomas did not tell that he is the grandson of the Norman Thomas. Franken implies that Miss Coulter's mistake (a trivial, insignificant one) is a lie so huge that it invalidates her entire career and proves, as well, the innocence of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. But, his contempt for his readers and his aversion to good sense and reasonable argument has only succeeded in fattening a skinny book with chickenshit.
Franken tries the same tactic to malign Sean Hannity. He quotes a transcript wherein Hannity is recorded as saying, "I don't have time to refute your facts." Gotcha, Franken says, you can't refute facts. True enough, but if Hannity had surrounded the word "facts" with quotation marks as he spoke, though they would not appear in the transcript, there would be absolutely nothing even formally wrong in what he said. Either way, with or without quotes, by giving center stage to puny points, Franken shows desperation, flop sweat, and a lack of judgment.
What Franken never evidences is a sense of humor. He isn't funny, that's the long and the short of it. This failing is due in part to his lack of facility in English. (His having grown to maturity in a Carpathian zinc-mining town probably accounts for this.) But his comedic deficiencies don't end there. Like all lefty "humorists," Franken has to work under a crushing burden. The Left is socialist at its core–-yes, that's why it is Left--and socialism's bankruptcy, moral and material, is now undeniable.
In consequence of socialism's manifest unfairness and its lack of productivity, would-be Lefty humorists have nothing affirmative to say and no secure platform from which to assault conservatives. They are constrained to be preposterously shrill like Murine Drowd or pathetically limp like Franken.
In contrast, Mark Steyn, Bob Tyrrell, lithe and lissome Ann Coulter, Trentino the Truthteller and many other opponents of socialism can turn a phrase to make a point and evoke laughter to make it memorable. I offer this example from a recent Tyrrell column in which he eviscerates the once-famous author of a once famous prodigiously stupid book, The Greening of America.
"...[Charles Reich] who in the late 1960s celebrated libidinous excess, drugs, and hippie youth -- had lived a monkish life before Greening appeared, a life made dull by an abstemious diet and nerve-wracking celibacy right into middle age. Then he discovered that his male member was not meant solely for urination. It was actually, as we say these days, a dual-use technology. Eee-yow what a mid-life crisis he had after that, and he was foolish enough to write all about it."
I could multiply examples. No need to. I'm sure you've got the picture.
Snicker...
Hooray for Bob Tyrrell.
That's a grin? I thought it was his butt-crack...
I love it!
I seriously believe the guy is mentally unstable!
P.J. O'Rourke's flatulance is funnier than Al.
Not really.
Indeed! Where did that gem come from?
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