In the 90s, Al Franken was the antidote to Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. His 1996 Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations was the first major mainstream pushback against the rising right-wing media that was already experimenting with how much they could get away with distorting the truth. He was then part of what Molly Ivins called the great liberal backlash of 2003 with his book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, taking on the neocons of the George W. Bush era and their extremist media apologists like Bill OReilly, Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity.
Two decades later, everything Franken predicted about the consequences of all those lies have come to bearin fact, its far worse than he could have imagined. But then, who could have imagined a supposed news organization like Fox would one day be able to smugly push false anti-vaccine information to its millions of viewers while actually requiring that all of its talking heads telling those lies be vaccinated? Its mind-boggling stuff that goes against any logic, but thats where we are.
Franken, meanwhile, found success as a politician before resigning from the U.S. Senate in 2018 after allegations of sexual impropriety. The circumstances around that resignation have been debated to death, so it will be interesting to see the reception Franken gets on his current standup tour, which comes to the Santa Cruz Civic on Friday. In this weeks cover story, Steve Kettmann talks to Franken about everything from the Russian invasion of Ukraine to Tucker Carlson to the Capitol riot. A quarter-century after Franken first brought up the subject, there are more lying liars to talk about than ever.
STEVE PALOPOLI | EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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Opinion: Taking on the Lying Liars | Good Times - Good Times