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Al Franken
Interviewed by Andrew Duncan

A former writer and performer for Saturday Night Live, mild-mannered satirist Al Franken is the best-selling author of Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot, Why Not Me?, and Oh, the Things I Know!. His latest salvo against political incompetency is Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. He sometimes wears pants.

What exactly was the apparently irony-phobic Fox thinking when they sued Al Franken over his use of the phrase "fair and balanced" in the title of his new book? The lawsuit was a publicist's dream -- it catapulted the author and his latest book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, to the top of the bestseller lists, and made the long-time comedy writer an overnight media sensation.

In Lies, a characteristically astute, outspoken, and witty Franken takes on two of the most influential powers in today's society: the right-wing media and the Bush administration. Thanks to the lawsuit, publicity for Lies is now Franken's full-time job. But thankfully, he took some time out of his uber-busy schedule to discuss getting sued, his book, and politics, politics, politics.

BookSense.com: Well, how was the lawsuit?

Al Franken: The lawsuit was great. It was crazy.

How I found out about the lawsuit is kind of funny. I went to Italy for a vacation, and I took Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point along. I'd never read the book, and I'd heard how great it was, and how it makes you see things differently, and so on. I thought it might give me a new perspective on how to market and promote Lies.

Well, for the first five days of my vacation I don't even want to think about The Tipping Point, but I finally crack the book open on the sixth -- and last -- night. I'm in bed, and it was really hot. The door's open...the fan's going...my wife's next to me. I'm reading the book, and as I get about halfway through, I start to fall asleep. I'm thinking as my eyes are closing, "Must think of tipping point...for book...must think of...tipping..." And I fall dead asleep.

My next conscious moment -- about 10 A.M. the next morning -- a guy from the house we were staying in walks in and goes, "Al, you're being sued by Fox!" It took a few seconds for this to register, and then I said, "Good!" And fell back asleep.

Later, I got up, got my emails, and I saw parts of the complaint. They were all really hilarious; describing me as "deranged," "intoxicated," and "unstable," and all that good stuff. The people who sued me said that this had been said about me in the press. The press they were citing came from the prestigious and accurate Internet, which can be prestigious and accurate, but not the Internet sites they chose.

The complaint against me cited two stories. One story was from NewsMax.com, which is a very extreme right-wing site. And the other story was from the WashingtonDispatch.com, which boasts "It doesn't matter whether your [sic] write regularly or on a whim, you have a better shot of getting your work placed on our site than with most other Internet publishers."

So, the irony started just piling up. Here was Fox trying to besmirch me, and they were going about it in a wholly dishonest way. It was just so Pirandello. I was thrilled. Team Franken was thrilled. The publisher was thrilled. We were all thrilled.

Did you actually have to show up in court?

No. In fact I was advised not to.

Really?

Well, there would've been a chance I would've been "intoxicated and deranged" and/or "unstable and shrill." (laughs)

You must already have enough material for your next book.

It's certainly enough for the paperback version of Lies. I'm thinking of including Fox's entire complaint, and perhaps a transcript of the hearing. The transcript of the hearing was hilarious. No, in fact it was f***ing hilarious. The judge's comments were great.

I was just lucky. I was just very, very lucky. So, we won, and thank you very much Fox.

How long did it take you to write Lies?

It took me about six months. I started the study group for the book at Harvard in late January, and then we handed the manuscript in around July 14 or something.

Pretty quick turnaround!

It was just brutal. Especially the last couple months. Things were still happening; things like the war were about to happen; and we were still doing a lot of research. Then, my publisher actually pushed the release date up after the BEA thing with Bill O'Reilly. With all of the heat the book was getting, booksellers were saying they wanted the book. I still had a sizeable portion of the book left to write at that point.

Why did you write Lies? What was the catalyst for the book?

Outrage at what I was hearing and seeing from both the Bush administration and their flacks in the right-wing press. The administration thrives on all this phony compassion. Everything they say is at odds with what they actually do, and the right-wing press is always covering for it.

Also, their idea of a liberal bias in the media was incredibly irksome to me, because I don't think the media is biased one way or another. I think if anything, the media bends over backward for anybody. However, there is a right-wing media, and it has a bias, and it has an agenda, and it pursues this agenda -- and in pursuing this agenda, it lies and cheats. Simple as that. So, I thought I'd go after them.

How do you think the right-wing media got so powerful in the first place?

They were smart about it. They started putting an apparatus together after the election in 1964 by getting a lot of money from people like Joseph Coors, and they started funding think tanks, journals, college newspapers, and people like David Brock and Ann Coulter. Then, Rush [Limbaugh] took over talk radio, and we let them do that. There was a lot of complacency on the left's part, I think, in terms of putting a machine together to disseminate our ideas.

Do you see the left ever getting back to being as influential as it once was?

This next election is really important, because part of the problem is the left is immobilized by Bush. But I do believe that this president's facade of credibility is crumbling, and if it falls apart, it'll never be put back together again.

Because of the Iraq situation?

I think certainly when the 16 words in the State of the Union [where Bush claimed that Iraq tried to obtain uranium in Africa] were proven false, it created enough discussion about how the government clearly misled people. And then the administration even attempted to parse the information by calling it "technically correct." But it wasn't even technically correct because they said the British learned something, and you can't learn something that isn't actually true. Michael Kinsley said that.

There was a case to be made for Iraq -- a good case -- but Bush didn't trust the American people to listen to the real case. The government misled people. And they're in such a habit of misleading. I think the American people would be willing to cut Bush a lot more slack if he had gotten into the war honestly. I think that's going to come back to haunt him. It's obviously haunting us right now. Basically all the international goodwill towards our country has been squandered.

We're also witnessing this environmental degradation, and watching Bush pledge to do more things he doesn't follow through with: "No Child Left Behind" is the most ironically named piece of legislation since the 1942 "Japanese Family Leave Act." He has no ideas on the economy other than to cut taxes -- which hasn't worked. He's created this huge deficit. He'll be the first president since Hoover not to create net new jobs in his first term. If you put the two Bushes together -- George H. W. and George W. -- that's more than six-and-a-half years of running this country, and during that time, they have created no new net jobs. Extrapolating from that fact, if the Bushes had run this country from its inception to the present day, no American would have ever worked.

Anyway, if anything's wrong in my book, I got it from British intelligence.

What do you hope to ultimately accomplish with Lies?

The ultimate goal is for this book to be a "tipping point" itself. That's very grandiose and ridiculous, but my hope is that people who read it realize they have to be more careful.

I think part of being a responsible citizen is trying to keep up, but there's just so much information coming at us that it's easier to go, "I don't want to listen to it." And a lot of what is communicated in politics is shouting, and a lot of it is unpleasant, and people turn it off. Part of the problem is that people have lives to live. They have work to go to. They have kids, and they have parents who are sick and/or getting older. People have things to do. So, part of the reason for doing my book is to distill this information I think is important.

I'm also asking the mainstream media to be a little more vigilant, and a little less lazy.

Have you heard from any of the people you criticize in the book yet?

I'm beginning to. [Wall Street Journal columnist Paul] Gigot in an interview has already told a journalist something that happened in Lies isn't true, but exactly what's in the book is how our conversation went down.

I don't know if they'll ever change: the right. They think they can say anything and get away with it. That's why O'Reilly can say, you know, "we won Peabodys." When he didn't. And then he can convince himself...well, I don't know what he convinces himself of.

It doesn't seem like the people you criticize have much of a sense of humor.

Yes, the people I criticize do not have much of a sense of humor, especially about themselves. But, you know, a lot of people don't have much of a sense of humor, and it doesn't make them bad people and it doesn't make them wrong. Not having a sense of humor isn't a disqualifier. For me, it's the misrepresentation, distortion, and lying that I have a problem with. I think not having a sense of humor betrays a certain viewpoint or a certain lack of emotional maturity or perspective or lack of intelligence. I think there are different kinds of intelligence, and sense of humor is a type of intelligence. So, it doesn't surprise me that Sean Hannity doesn't have a great sense of humor.

And again, if anything is wrong in my book, I got it from British intelligence.

Purchase Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right and Al Franken's other books on BookSense.com!

Further Reading:

• Mark Hertsgaard
• Eric Schlosser
• Andrew Marlatt

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