Revolutionary Moderation

The last of my summer reading



On Saturday, I finally dug up a copy of Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, and have been reading it in most of my spare hours since. Today, I thought I'd look for the rebuttals online. After all, the charges that Al Franken makes are pretty serious, and if I were Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, or Bill O'Reilly, I'd probably want to address each charge specifically and carefully. But then, I'm not a lying liar, afraid of being exposed as such.



Here's the best rebuttal I could find. The best rebuttal:

Fox News has become the highest-rated news network on cable because we feature lively debate and all honest voices are welcome. We don't do drive-by character assassinations, and we don't denigrate opposing points of view by launching gratuitous personal attacks. Fox's presentation is in the tradition of the raucous town meeting where passion and conviction are on display. We challenge people of all political persuasions.



It makes me sick to see intellectually dishonest individuals hide behind the First Amendment to spread propaganda, libel and slander. But this is a growing trend in America, where the exchange of ideas often degenerates into verbal mud wrestling with intent to injure. The poo-bahs at The Times know what a smear campaign is, but apparently, if it's directed at an enterprise the paper disapproves of, it's okay. I wonder how The Times' editorialists would react if their faces graced a book cover accompanied by the word "liar." Oh, right, they'd consider it satire.

Wait a minute. Drive-by character assassination? It's a book! And it's filled with detailed evidentiary arguments. Admittedly, the personal attacks are there too (check the title), but when Franken offers up a list of lies, and then calls the issuer of the lies a "liar", it can't simply be written off as an ad hominem argument.



Again, if I were one of the people fingered as a lying liar, I'd probably be addressing the specific examples Franken raises to disprove the general charge. I'll keep looking for that rebuttal, but until I find one, I have to assume Franken knows what he's talking about.