Then flip it around!
Read this, pretty funny!
Rich Lowry
Anecdotes and cartoons. Anecdotes and cartoons. Don't use those words with Al Franken to characterize his new book. It's like waving a no-bid Halliburton contract in front of Dennis Kucinich. Or shouting "Fox News" in a crowded room of CNN executives. Franken's eyes bulge, his veins pop, his panties twist, and he calls you a prick.
Actually, let me be strictly accurate. I don't know what happens to Franken's eyes, his veins, or his panties. But I have been on and off the phone with him for the last week, and I do know that he calls you a prick.
Why so many conversations with someone most conservatives would welcome talking to as much as an insistent left-wing telemarketer ("No, no, no, really — Bush didn't lie about WMD in Iraq and I don't want the new plan from MCI")? Well, Franken challenged me to a fist-fight.
I can hear the sighs rattling through cyberspace: "Again?" Yes, again. What can I say? Franken has a devotion to his old material. If Rodney Dangerfield never tires of saying "I get no respect," why should Franken stop challenging me to fights?
The last time he issued such a challenge he had heard me decrying the Oprah-fication of American politics and culture in a talk broadcast on C-SPAN. I declined then. Franken wrote about it in a chapter in Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. I wrote about this chapter in a column, in which I called his book a "collection of anecdotes and cartoons." Franken objected to my column, and particularly to that description of his book. Long story, short: He challenged me to another fight.
I declined again. As I tried to explain Franken, as an editor of a serious political magazine, I have a limited capacity to engage in childish stunts. To preempt similar offers, let me say for the record: No Al, I can't mud-wrestle you. No, I can't participate in a lemon-meringue pie-eating contest. No, I can't face off in a monster-truck pull. No, I can't duel at 15 paces. No, I can't race you down Broadway wearing big floppy red clown shoes.
I can, however, write. So, my counter-challenge to Franken was to have a battle of books. We would each write a piece about each other's tome. (Have I mentioned anecdotes and cartoons lately?) Franken agreed. So on the neutral site, spinsanity.com, Franken will take on Legacy and I will take on Lying Liars.
This will require reading Franken's book, which I haven't done. Instead, I relied for my column on that time-tested journalistic shortcut: reading closely only the part about me. Franken assures me that my view of his book was unduly colored by the fact that the bits I read and skimmed were anecdotes and cartoons. The rest apparently could have been written by Nathan Glazer. Well, I'll soon find out.
In his dark moments of introspection, Franken fears that by accepting this challenge he has stumbled into a clever ploy to promote Legacy — that, in short, he may be the new Kathryn Lopez (see here and here). Sheepishly, I can only admit that he is right. With this high-stakes, high-intensity, high-profile exchange, I desperately hope to get the attention of Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie. Ed, please, if you're out there — do for me what Terry McAuliffe has done for Al Franken. Get in the bulk book-buying game. See Terry and raise him. Don't let the DNC out-buy you now — not with a presidential election and my Amazon rating hanging in the balance.
I hope my sure-to-be devastating takedown of Lying Liars will kill off the book's runaway sales. But Franken hasn't nearly exhausted his audience. After the mass-buy from the Democratic National Committee, there is still the Democratic Senatorial Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democratic Governors' Association, the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice, John Huang, the National Federation of Democrats Who Like Lame John Ashcroft Jokes, and the Young Democratic Club of the Upper West Side's P.S. 123.
In any case, stay tuned for more details about Lowry vs. Franken. There probably won't be bloodshed, but you never know. Anecdotes and cartoons. Anecdotes and cartoons . . .
To show that I am a bigger man than Rich I accepted his challenge even though he continues to be a pantywaist. I still contend that you can't call Democrats "sissified" and then refuse to fight.
I knew that Rich would try to milk this to get publicity for his sorry Regnery book that has fallen off the bestseller list despite the customary bulk buys by Richard Mellon Scaife. Right now there are tens of thousands of copies of Legacy being fed through a wood chipper on the Scaife estate to provide mulch for its prize-winning rose gardens.
Fortunately, since Rich is so desperate to use my mega-book to help his faltering sales, I am in position to call the shots. Hence, my contribution here.
First, a link to my chapter in Lies which tells the real story of my original challenge to Rich.
Now a link to Rich's shamelessly dishonest column about my book, entitled, at least in the New York Post, "Al Franken's Lying Lies."
You'll notice that in his column, Rich accuses me of a grand total of two lies. First, that I described him as "terrified" during our initial phone call. Believe me, he was. Rich says that's impossible because we were being "jocular." Thing is, it's actually possible to joke while you're terrified. In fact, that was the entire basis for centuries of Jewish humor.
The second lie is that I claimed that Rich had stopped talking about Democrats feminizing politics after our encounter on the phone. But, in fact, I wrote that I just thought he had, and even held out the possibility that Rich had indeed continued that nonsense. Still I could have assigned one of my research assistants to Nexis all of Rich's articles, and for that I apologize. We were busy trying to confirm that Iraq had attempted to buy uranium from Niger.
(Note: If Rich does find any factual errors in my book, they are the fault of British Intelligence. For example, on page 253 of Lies I claim that Sean Hannity lived up Newt Gingrich's ass from 1994 to 1998. I got that from British Intelligence. It turns out that Sean didn't take residence up Newt's ass until early '95.)
Nevertheless Rich accuses me of lying in the above case because I "preferred to rely on incomplete information in order to create an untrue impression. This is a deception, a kind of a lie."
Yet when Rich calls my book "a loosely knit collection of anecdotes padded out with cartoons," one would assume he had read the entire book that he had actually held in his hands. Only now he admits he did not. Instead, he only read the chapter on himself. Talk about relying "on incomplete information to create an untrue impression."
Of the forty-three chapters, two contain illustrations. One, "The Gospel of Supply Side Jesus," is a parody of a Christian tract illustrated, with my words, by renowned comic-book artist Don Simpson. It has been reprinted on BeliefNet.com, the largest website on religious and spiritual issues in this country, and has sparked debate in newspapers like the Chicago Tribune on the proper role of religion in creating tax policy.
The only other chapter containing illustrations is "Operation Chickenhawk" about "masculine" Republican Chickenhawks such as George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, Clarence Thomas, and Bill O'Reilly serving on John Kerry's swift boat on the Mekong. They go up river to extract a renegade squad that won't fight: guys named Gingrich, Limbaugh, George "Stone" Will, Pat Buchanan, and Phil Gramm. This chapter, more than any other, shows the fallacy of the masculine Republican versus the feminized Democrat. Then Rich criticizes John Kerry, a guy one hundred times the man of either of us, for "his recent resort to easy tears."
There are anecdotes. But often they are a way of talking about real policy questions: crime, national defense, corruption, the insanity of O'Reilly and Coulter and Hannity.
Most of the chapters, however, are anecdote-free.
So, who's the lying liar, my friends? We'll find out soon. Rich hopes before Christmas, so he can be sucked into my tailwind and ride the holiday buying spree. Me, I'll see when I finish Legacy. I've started and it's a little slow-going. Maybe January 3 or 4.
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