A big liberal "Thank you" to Fox

I just want to go on record as saying I'm grateful to Fox for suing Al Franken over the title of his book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.

Due in no small measure to the publicity generated by Fox's ridiculous claim--dismissed by US District Judge Denny Chin as "wholly without merit, both factually and legally"--Franken's hilarious book is now a smash hit, as reported by Ciro Scotti in Business Week Online:

Now Fox, and especially its blustery everyman host Bill O'Reilly, are the laughingstock of Media City. Laughing hardest is Franken, a hilarious and sometimes abrasive ex-writer and performer on Saturday Night Live whose previous books include Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations. With a little help from his enemies at Fox, Lies and the Lying Liars is now the #2 best-selling book on Amazon.com, as of Sept. 3, and has also just grabbed the top spot on The New York Times Best-Seller List.

The book (which has since gone to #1 at Amazon as well) really is funny. More importantly, it drives home again and again the fact that the corporate media cannot be taken at face value. Time after time, Franken exposes the pronouncements of the right-wing talking heads as outrageous distortions or outright lies.

Buy this book and loan it to anyone you know who has a brain. My standard practice, in recommending it to Republican friends, is to sell the sizzle, not the steak. "Whether you agree with him or not," I tell them, "it's a good laugh." Once they read it, I'm betting that it will at least pull a little of the wool off their eyes; hopefully they'll start taking the Bush League lies with a grain of salt. Who knows? Maybe they'll even think about checking some of the facts for themselves.

That can only help. There are far too many good, honest people who have been taken in by the propaganda of the vast right-wing conspiracy. To take back our country and reclaim our freedom, all we have to do is get those people to open their eyes and look. Once you see the man behind the curtain, it becomes impossible to believe in the wizard.