Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [71]
But let’s take a more comprehensive look at Clinton’s remarkable record on crime, using statistics from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports. Violent crime had gone up nearly every year of the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations. It went down every year during the Clinton administration, especially after his crime bill went into effect. Would you like to see it in chart form?
Now would you like to see it in a chart that, while technically accurate, is slightly and intentionally misleading? The kind the Wall Street Journal would use?
To be fair to opponents of gun control, there were a lot of other things Clinton did to achieve this remarkable, un-Reagan-like drop in crime rates. He put more cops on the street; he instituted community policing; he aggressively enforced the Community Reinvestment Act, which requires banks to lend money to small businesses and homeowners in underserved communities; and, of course, he gave us the best economy in the history of the world. So Brady and the assault weapons ban were just a part of this incredible, and unprecedented, success in making America a safer and better place to live and raise our families.
Okay, maybe that sounds a little partisan. So let’s go back to that original imbecilic editorial to see who’s really right here. You know, the great thing about our society is that we have a free press, where different viewpoints can be expressed in a spirit of fearless inquiry. Sometimes, like in the case of the Journal and gun control, these opinions can prove to be badly, badly wrong. That happens. And no one would suggest that every editorial board has an obligation to admit when they’ve been wrong. Simply ignoring editorial mistakes is perfectly within the accepted practice of hack journalism.
But when an editorial page goes out of its way to print facts that prove it completely wrong, and then claims that these statistics prove it completely right, well, that is not just bad, it’s downright weird.
In a way, this one little dumb-ass editorial is a microcosm of the Journal’s editorial page. How much is stupidity? How much is dishonesty, and how much is the Journal just trusting that its readers’ rabid ideological convictions will blind them to gaping holes in their reasoning? Hard to say.
Can you imagine another field where you could get away with this level of sloppiness? Picture an ad agency pitching this SUV commercial:
VIDEO: CLIPS OF SUVs TIPPING OVER.
ANNOUNCER (VOICE OVER):
The new Ford Explorer. Like all SUVs, impossible to tip over! Put your child in an Explorer today, and see the results.
CUT TO: SHOT OF PARALYZED CHILD.
If you were Ford, you’d fire that agency, wouldn’t you?
In conclusion, if I were Ford, I wouldn’t hire the Wall Street Journal to make ads for any dangerous products I might want to foist upon an unsuspecting public. But that hasn’t stopped the Bush administration from relying on the Journal to sell the public the most dangerous product of all: defective baby strollers that can collapse unexpectedly and crush a child.
Also, tax cuts.
25
“This Was Not a Memorial to Paul Wellstone”: A Case Study in Right-Wing Lies
When I do my corporate speeches, I normally talk to groups that are anywhere from 60 to, oh, 97 percent Republican. They know I’m liberal, and they’re normally aware that they’re conservative. So sometimes they’re a little nervous that I’ll do jokes that make them uncomfortable or angry. Here’s how I defuse the situation.
I say, “As you probably can figure out from my book Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot, I’m a liberal. And I know you’re conservative. And that’s okay. See, I’ve discovered that Democrats can’t afford me.”
Huge laugh. They love this. It makes them feel rich.
Then I say, “So what I do is, I make fun of you. You laugh. And then you pay me.”
Another huge laugh. Now I can say pretty much anything I want, and they’ll just laugh and pay me. Everybody’s happy.
Democrats are a different story. Unlike corporate events (which, by the way, I love—you can book me on the web), I speak