Truth - Al Franken [1]
In The Truth, the fish are bigger, and the fry is deeper.
Franken’s targets this time include both people—Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rove, DeLay—and something new: ideas. In particular, the idea that the 2004 election meant that Franken’s beloved America had moved to the right. Al Franken ain’t buyin’ it.
Using access to confidential documents and firsthand accounts, Franken weaves the true story of the Making of the President 2004, starring the Three Horsemen of the Republican Apocalypse: Fear, Smears, and Queers.
Franken shows more than how Bush won. He shows what Bush won. (Or in the case of a mandate, what he didn’t win.)
But this story chronicles more than a rise. It chronicles a fall. And what a fall! Was Bush like Icarus, simply a man who dared to dream—a man who flew too close to the sun? Or like Daedalus, a man who equipped his son with unsafe wings made of easily melted beeswax?
As Franken makes clear, the answer is both—and neither.
If you doubt that Icarus has fallen, then I say these words to you: Terri Schiavo, Social Security, Ahmed Chalabi, Tom DeLay, and Iraq.
But this book is more than just a disconnected list of names, places, and topics. Far more. It is something new for Franken. And, I would argue, for literature. Here, Franken has taken a single stem cell—the English language—and grown from it a fully functional kidney with which to purify the blood of the body politic.
In the rarified sphere of contemporary general-audience nonfiction, few books live up to the promise offered by their title. Fewer still, their subtitle. But in The Truth (with jokes), the author lives up to not only his title and his subtitle but, most important, to the name that appears on the cover. Al Franken.
Anonymous
New York, NY
August 13, 2005
Book One
The Triumph of Evil
1 Election Day
November 2, 2004, 3:43 P.M.
It was a cool, misty day in Boston, Massachusetts, and TeamRadioFranken was riding high. And for good reason. We had just put on an excellent show. And we were about to take over the country.
Exit polls leaked to us by our sources in the bowels of the liberal media indicated that John Forbes Kerry, who you might recall was running for President of the United States on the Democratic ticket, was surging ahead of George W. Bush, who was about to become a one-term president like his loser father.
Our hard work had paid off. In the preceding seven months we had built an explosively popular radio network that, in our view at that moment, had fundamentally redefined American political discourse. In the 2000 election, the right-wing propaganda apparatus had succeeded in painting Al Gore as a serial exaggerator and political opportunist. But in 2004 we were there to fight back. And fight back we did. For three hours a day, five days a week, The Al Franken Show had counterattacked the Republican noise machine with truth and comedy doled out with unbridled ferocity and glee. We had delivered the facts, and we had delivered the funny. And now we were tasting the sweet fruit of our labors. In fact, the exit polls suggested we were so far ahead, some us were privately wondering if we hadn’t worked too hard in the preceding weeks and months. Perhaps we should have devoted more time to our families or hobbies.
Some might describe our mood as smug. Others might call it giddy. Both would be correct. There was a smug giddiness in the room, so smug and giddy that, as we planned for our November 3 broadcast, we didn’t bother wasting even a minute sketching out a Plan B—what to say if Bush won rather than Kerry.
My staff was