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Al Franken
Comedian; Author, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right
When Bush was running in 2000 he said he was against nation building. When he said that, I didn't realize he meant only our nation. We have lost 2.5 million jobs in this country since Bush has become president; he'll be the first president since Herbert Hoover who has not created a new net job in his first term. If you put the two Bushes together, Bush I and Bush II, and the almost seven years that they have been presidents, they have not created one new net job. Numbers do not lie, ladies and gentlemen. Extrapolate from that: if the Bushes had run this country from its very inception to the present day, not one American would have ever worked. We'd be cave men.
During Bill Clinton's eight years, 22 to 23 million new jobs were created. I heard him speak a few months ago to the Council on Foreign Relations. He spoke from a few notes, spoke for a couple hours in great depth and breadth on the situation in the world. It made me miss him. In fairness to President Bush, there's more to being president than simply being articulate, intelligent and knowledgeable. Language is not the president's strong point. Remember when he first started using evildoers, and the rest of the administration felt that they had to use evildoers, too, to make it sound like it's an actual word? Ari Fleischer would say "evildoers" this, "evildoers" that, and you expect that from Ari Fleischer; he's a chimp. What was great was watching somebody like Cheney try to work evildoers into a speech. It would be like, This is not a war against Islam. It is an effort to eradicate the . . . evildoers.
Fair and Balanced
People have asked me about the Fox lawsuit. I had a dust-up in Los Angeles with Bill O'Reilly at a book expo. I was promoting my book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, and Bill had seen earlier that his picture was on the cover. He started saying things like, "I don't call people liars. I don't do that." Evidently, he's never actually watched his show. I explained it using transcripts from his shows and proved him pretty much to be a pathological liar. He didn't like that, so he said, "Shut up! You've had your 35 minutes! Shut up!" Which was interesting, I'd only spoken for 20 minutes, so he couldn't even tell me to shut up without lying.
About a week later we got a threat of a lawsuit from Fox saying they'd sue us if we didn't take O'Reilly off the cover and Fair and Balanced off the title. My publisher got nervous. I said, "I've been a satirist for 30 years. They do not have a case." I've learned that satire is protected speech, even if the object of the satire doesn't get it. I said, "Our letter to Fox should be, 'Dear Fox: Please, please, please sue us.'" And that calmed her down; she got Floyd Abrams, one of the preeminent First Amendment lawyers in the country, and he sent them a letter. It wasn't the "Please, please, please" letter - it was the "Dear Fox: This is America" letter. We didn't hear anything for a long time. I thought it went away. Then, just as the books were being printed, I heard that it was announced that Fox was suing us, and I started jumping up and down.
They were literally laughed out of court. The suit was based on their trademark, "Fair and Balanced." I didn't know if I was being sued for the actual trademark or the irony of the trademark. Now, usually when you say, "literally laughed out of court," you mean "figuratively laughed out of court." Not in this case. The hearing opened with the Fox attorney saying, "The Fox News Channel has over 85 million subscribers." The judge said, "I don't know what that means. I get cable; does that mean that I'm a Fox News Channel subscriber?" The Fox attorney said, "Yes." Wall-to-wall laughter.
At the end, the judge rendered his verdict. He started by saying, "There are hard cases, and there are easy cases. This is an easy case." He said to the Fox lawyers, "Your case is wholly without merit, both factually and legally, and it is highly unlikely that your trademark, 'Fair and Balanced,' is valid." They withdrew their suit. You'll notice that they don't use "Fair and Balanced" on Fox anymore, if you watch it, which I wouldn't recommend. But I think the judge may have inadvertently given Fox their new slogan: "The Fox News Channel: Wholly Without Merit."
O'Reilly was on Terry Gross the other day. He walked off the show. She asked him if he had anything to do with the lawsuit. He said no. He was lying. Everyone at Fox who's been talked to by the media said, "Yeah, it was O'Reilly, we were mad at him because we looked stupid." He lies all over the Terry Gross interview. There's one interesting area where she asks him about Jeremy Glick - the son of someone who died in the World Trade Center. He had signed an anti-war petition, and that made O'Reilly kind of angry. So he has Jeremy Glick on, and at the end of the interview Jeremy was espousing some very left-wing things, but not crazy left-wing things at all, and Bill cut him off and said, "Shut up! Shut up!" (Does that sound familiar? It's in the transcripts.), then cut off Jeremy's mic and kicked him off the show and then, according to Jeremy, O'Reilly told him, "Get the f--- out of here before I f---ing tear you to pieces," and that O'Reilly's staff told him, "Please leave, we don't want our boss to get arrested." This is in Harper's and it's reported also in The New Yorker and stuff. So Terry Gross asks him about this, and he says, "Well, did you read the transcript?" She says, "Well, I read the transcript in Harper's." And he goes, "Well, that's taken out of context. What this kid said was that Bush I and II had orchestrated the attacks on the World Trade Center. All you have to do is you get the full transcript. It's easily available. You'll see the person came into the show and said that the attack on 9/11 was an alleged attack, all right? And then he proceeded to attack President Bush and his father, Bush the elder, for orchestrating the attack on their own country." Now, I asked Phil Bronstein, the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, to read that transcript. Is there anywhere in that transcript that Jeremy Glick says that Bush I and Bush II orchestrated the attack on the World Trade Center?
Bronstein: No, the only reference I could find in the transcript that Al provided me - Jeremy Glick says, "Our current president now inherited a legacy from his father that's responsible for training militarily, economically, and situating geopolitically the parties involved," essentially, in 9/11. So that seems to be a distinction with a difference. So, no, there's nothing -
Franken: No, not at all.
Bronstein: No.
Franken: And also it's true.
Bronstein: That is not a lie.
Franken: So Bill O'Reilly is defaming the child of a man who died in 9/11. I got an e-mail from Jeremy Glick. He says, among other things, "It's very difficult to lose your dad in such a violent fashion, and even harder to have your love for your family questioned so abrasively by such right-wing hacks as O'Reilly. He has been defaming me almost weekly. He is telling the press that I said that Bush knew about the WTC. We never even gestured toward the question of prior knowledge, and, anyway, I don't believe Bush knew. This is obvious to anyone who saw the episode or read the full transcript. This is very damaging for me. I'm a Ph.D. candidate and a freelance writer. It doesn't help me to get gigs being painted as some sort of conspiracy nut."
The Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland just released a study correlating the relationship between where people get their news and misperceptions about the war in Iraq. Misperceptions they focused on were: there's proof that there's ties between Saddam and Al Qaeda; we have found weapons of mass destruction; and the majority of world opinion was for our invading Iraq. Eighty percent of the people who get most of their news from the Fox News Channel held at least one of those three misperceptions. Of people who get most of their news from NPR and PBS, 23 percent held one of those three misperceptions. One of the great parts of the study is that the more you watched Fox, the more likely you were to have one of those misperceptions. In other words, the more you watch Fox, the stupider you get.
Weapons of Mass Destruction
We all heard, in the State of the Union address, that British intelligence had learned that Iraq had tried to procure large quantities of uranium from Africa. Very frightening - if it had been true. (By the way, if anything in my book is wrong, I got it from British intelligence.) The White House knew this wasn't true. It's one thing for a president to lie about his sex life; it's another thing for a president to lie about why we're sending our men and women into harm's way. This president misled us. There was supposed to be this imminent threat from Iraq. That was the reason we went into war. Americans have to ask some serious questions: What did the president know, and if not, why didn't he know it? If, as may be the case, the president did not understand his intelligence briefings, did he ask to have them explained to him? Did he know that he didn't understand them? These are questions that must be asked repeatedly and in an accusatory tone.
As I go around the country doing my book tour, I'm getting huge crowds. I think it's because the book, and other books like it, have just awakened a lot of people in this country who were demoralized and are mad. And there's a reason they're mad, and it's not a good thing just to be mad. After 9/11, this country was as united as I've ever seen this country. This president had an opportunity to lead a united country into a new American century in a spirit of mutual purpose and mutual sacrifice. Everyone got caught up in the patriotic fervor, even people you never expect. A friend of mine who I never would have expected went right to his closet, got out his old America T-shirt. It took him about four hours to whiteout sucks, but still. This president had an opportunity, and like he squandered our budget surplus and our surplus of goodwill around the world, he squandered this opportunity and instead just used it for his own political benefit. He cut those huge taxes on those of us in the top bracket and didn't ask anyone to sacrifice - except for our young men and women and those at the bottom, single mothers who are losing Medicaid for their kids because states are having huge deficit problems. (I don't know if that's happened here - has it? )
Those of us at the top, the upper-middle class, we're not asked to sacrifice at all. The only thing we're asked to do is stay alert. You know, the highest level we've gone so far is the orange level of alert, which is the second highest level, but the highest level at which you're still encouraged to go to the mall. At the highest level - red alert - the president would encourage you to shop online.
This is a president who had an opportunity after 9/11, and he blew it. Don't let anyone tell you that liberals don't love this country. And don't tell anyone that liberals don't love our troops overseas.
