Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [34]
Another lie from Sean Hannity. Or was it? It occurred to me that I had been escorted out—by Colmes. In addition to being Sean’s liberal on-air punching bag, maybe, just maybe, Colmes also worked security detail at Fox. In fact, now that I thought about it, as the only liberal at Fox, Colmes probably did a lot of other odd jobs around the network.
As it turns out, I was right. In the “Odd Jobs” chapter in Alan’s new autobiography, Back to You, Sean: The Alan Colmes Story, we learn that Colmes’s duties as cohost of Hannity and Colmes include adding toner to the copiers and printers, loofah-ing Roger Ailes in his personal steam room, and ordering Chinese food for editors working on misleading video packages. A scrupulous removal of lint from Sean’s jacket using Alan’s trusty lint roller, and it’s show time. After another fabulous show, Hannity may be headed home, but Alan Colmes’s day is just beginning. There’s floors to mopped, plants to be watered, light bulbs to be replaced, and coffee to be ground for the morning. It’s lonely being the only liberal at Fox, but Alan doesn’t mind. There is so much satisfaction to be had, not just from occasionally getting a word in edgewise on his own show, but from hearing Roger Ailes’s chuckle when he sees the little paper strip reading “Hannitized for Your Protection” that the former comedian carefully placed across the seat of the toilet in his private bathroom.
If you haven’t heard of Colmes’s book, it may be because it’s been overshadowed by Hannity’s own page-turner, The New York Times best-seller Let Freedom Ring. The book lays out the conservative party line on everything from A to Z, where A is for abortion and Z is for zupply-zide zeconomics. Amazon.com reviewer Reagan Ohendalski of Huntsville, Texas, gives the book five stars and calls Sean “the new conservative genius.” In his review, he goes on, “Don’t listen to these other jerks who are only rating the book with 1 star to bring down the average.”
Whether or not Let Freedom Ring deserves one star or five depends very much on how one judges books. If one relies on the uninformed, or “Ohendalski,” approach, a five it is! However, TeamFranken used a more sophisticated approach. We asked questions like “Is what the book says true?” and “How could Hannity be so incredibly obnoxious?” and “Why would any sane person buy this book?”
To arrive at our rating, TeamFranken weighted the first question, “Is what the book says true?” 85 percent more heavily than the other two questions combined. This may seem unfair to Mr. Hannity, who, as we will demonstrate below, does not understand percentages.
You’d think, according to our weighting system, we’d start with the lies. But instead, for reasons too technical to be explained here, I’ll just start with the incredibly obnoxious stuff.
Here’s a doozy: pages 145 to 146. Hannity is ranting about the “absolute abomination” that is the New York City public school system. After rattling off some grim statistics about test scores, he says:
City and state education officials didn’t seem to have a clue about what was going wrong. “Is it teaching?” asked state Education Commissioner Richard Mills. “Is it teaching practice? Is it the material? Is it the work students are doing? What are they reading? What are they writing? What kind of math problems are they doing?”
What are these people doing with our tax dollars if they don’t even know the answers to these questions? [Italics in original.]
You should know, dear reader, that as I read these right-wing books, I often scrawl notes in the margins. When I reached this particular nugget, I wrote:
“Rhetorical question, asshole!”
It sure seemed like Mr. Mills was dramatically illustrating his commitment to examining every aspect of the state’s educational system in