Genre

Non-fiction

Fiction

Audiobooks

Voices from the American Left

by Michael Moore and Al Franken

I didn't mean to read three such similar books one right after the other. It just so happened that my reserved copies of both Lies and Stupid White Men came up at the same time at the library—right after I'd finished my own copy of Dude. Being in high demand, I could only keep the books for two weeks, so I had to read them immediately. But reading them together did prove a somewhat interesting exercise. Each, for example, provided different but equally startling facts about George W Bush, which add up to a pretty alarming whole.

Stupid White Men begins by detailing the Florida sheninigans that put Bush in the White House. Not just the dickering over whether pregnant and dimpled chads should be counted, but also items that were news to me, such as:

• Florida's Katherine Harris, under Governor Jeb Bush, instructed a polling company to cast as wide a net as possible to remove felons from Florida voter rolls. (Ex-felons cannot vote in Florida.) The result was not only the exclusion of many who had committed only misdemeanors (like parking violations), but many who had never been convicted of anything of all. Most of the unfairly excluded were black. 90% of blacks in Florida vote Democrat. (Oh, and this story was broken by the BBC, not by American media.)
• John Ellis, first cousin of George Bush, instructed Fox News to declare Bush the winner when, by all reports, it was too close to call. This gave Gore the veneer of election “spoiler.”
• Including all military ballots in the vote, included 544 that were cast or mailed after the election. This is against election rules. But 85% of the military vote Republican.
• Even after all that, it still looked like Gore was going to squeek out a win in Florida. At that point, the conservative members of the Supreme Court stopped the recount, and declared Bush the President.

Franken's Lies picks up the narrative with his description of Bush's “Operation Ignore,” a scathing account of how the Bush administration ignored Clinton's information about Al Qaeda and his plan to combat terrorism in favour of funding the missile defense initiative. Not to mention taking long vacations on the ranch.

I had previously read accounts of how the US ignored intelligence that may very well have prevented the 9/11 attacks, but Franken really has a knack for making it seem as though Bush and Co. were acting with reckless disregard. He give evidence of Clinton's “obsession” with terrorism in general, and al Qaeda in particular (something most liberals probably wouldn't have approved of prior to 9/11, but anyway), then describes the efforts of several advisors, commisionners, and senators to getting the Bush-ites to execute Clinton's plans. As the countdown to 9/11 approaches, they continue ignore the information and put off decisions.

After 9/11, of course, they tried to blame Clinton.

Dude, Where's My Country provides some facts that would have been much more shocking to me f I hadn't seen a CBC documentary on the subject a few weeks before reading this. But note—that's a CBC documentary. Canadian. Why aren't Americans hearing more about this stuff? While Moore might go a little far in blaming the Saudi military, the following is still true:

• The bin Ladens have had business relations with the Bush family off and on for 25 years. In fact, George Bush Sr. was with in a meeting with a member of the bin Laden family on September 11, 2001.
• The Bushes are also very close to the Saudi Royal family.
• While Americans were stranded the world over after 9/11, the US government allowed the bin Laden family to fly out of the US without even being questioned by the FBI.
• When Bush was governor of Texas, the Taliban traveled there to meet with oil and gas interests.

So if you were wondering why Bush attacked Afghanistan and then Iraq when the September 11 terrorists were mostly Saudis....

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Stupid White Men is a publishing phenomenon, a best-seller in both 2002 and 2003, still in demand (and in hardcover) to this day. It was written largely in response to Moore's anger over the 2000 election, but covers other issues dear to Moore's heart: corporate greed, racism (that chapter is called “Kill Whitey”), starving public education, environmental destruction, sexism, foreign policy (including his views on Israel), and the American (in)justice system.

It's a fast read, it's all told in entertaining and often humorous fashion, and it really is chock full of appalling facts. (Actually, it was all making me a little depressed by the end of it.) But it's also a bit of a hodge-podge, and Moore can't help going a bit over the top at times, in a way I find somewhat off-putting. I guess his point is that the US is just not attaining its potential, and neither the Republicans nor the Democrats (who also come under intense criticism in his “Democrats, DOA” chapter) have the guts to do anything about it. Moore wants you, me, all of us to get involved to change the system. (Being Canadian, and therefore not having a US congressman or senator to support or not support, I kind of skimmed the “call to arms” parts of the book.)

Franken's book, by contrast, is held together by a central argument that he is refuting: that the media has a liberal bias. He argues that not only is that not true, but that much of the media has a right-wing bias that is maintained largely through distortions and outright lies. Franken's also received a fair amount of attention, and a jump in sales, after Fox News threatened to sue him for including the phrase “fair and balanced” in his title. Which kind of only provided his point.

Franken writes in an even funnier and more readable style than Moore. His agenda is also slightly different—not so much a call to political action as a return to civil debate. (“Who Created the Tone?” “Did the Tone Change?” “Why Did Anyone Think It Would Change?” “I Grow Discouraged About the Tone” I just love his chapter titles.) This means that the book doesn't go as over the top as Moore's occasionally does.

Not having been exposed to the right-wing media he's discussing (do we even get Rush Limbaugh and Fox News here?), I found much of that information rather astonishing. Franken takes on several prominent right-wing journalists (among them “Ann Coulter: Nutcase,” “You Know Who I Don't Like? Ann Coulter,” “I Bitch-Slap Bernie Goldstein,” “Bill O'Reilly: Lying, Splotchy Bully,” “Hannity and Colmes”) and dissects exactly how their “arguments” are based on out of context quotes, incorrect statistics invalidly interpreted, and information that is simply made up. And how they complain that the liberals are “abusive”—then insult liberals in the worst ways imaginable. The US media is clearly bizarre.

A bit more frightening is the exposure of some of George W.'s bigger whoppers, such as “By far the vast majority of my tax cuts go to those at the bottom” (well, sure, in some universe where 14.7% is considered a “vast majority”) and claiming that he had campaigned on the premised that he would only deficit spend “in times of war, in times of economic insecurity as a result of a recession, or in times of national emergency.” Except that he hadn't ever such a thing during the campaign. Al Gore did. But Bush keeps repeating these lines, and he barely gets called on them at all. (I've noticed there's a whole book out now about Bush's lies, but I think I'll take a little break from US politics in my reading now.) Can you imagine a prominent Canadian politician getting away with this?

Which brings us to Dude, in which Mike shares with us a whole series of Bush Whoppers on Iraq:

• Iraq has nuclear weapons! (Nope)
• Iraq has chemical and biological weapons! (Not so far)
• Iraq has ties to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda! (No, although Bush does)
• Saddam is the most evil man in the world. (Well, OK, he is evil. But plenty of other leaders are just as or even more evil, yet the US isn't bombing their countries.)

He also addresses the question you are left wondering about after reading Franken's book: why the heck are right-wing so angry? He argues (with statistics) that they know their views are actually in the minority in America, and that kind of freaks them out. Makes as much sense to me as anything.

While somewhat repetitive of Stupid White Men, it's also a bit more conciliatory and unified, and certainly has the virtue of timeliness (along with the usual fast read and humour). One can only hope that he's not just preaching to the choir in America