Al on George W. Bush...

Personally, I think the President, like most Americans, is smarter than Sean Hannity. So when Bush, who, after all, is President of the United States, repeatedly says something that isn't true, it's not confusion. It’s a lie.

Al Franken, from Lies...pg. 289.

I am not going to come down on Al Franken over the WMD issue, because I feel that he dealt with that very fairly in his book, and I admire him for it. Although he obviously does feel that Bush misled the nation, he did admit to being caught up in the WMD scare at one point, as most of us were. Just a quick note on the matter, though, he was incorrect in using the word "lies" to describe the intelligence about uranium from Niger and the possibility of Saddam Hussein being six months away from developing a nuclear weapon. The facts may prove erroneous, but the intelligence was very real, and when we live in a world where unthinkable things happen at the hands of terrorists groups, we need to take the intelligence very seriously.

"But wait!" you say. "Bush knew that the intelligence about uranium was inaccurate!"

Not true. The man who dropped that political bomb admitted that he himself had never directly spoken with George W. Bush. In fact, his refutation was found primarily in newspapers and tabloids. But that's only a small issue. Everyone has their opinion about WMD, and whether or not they are a figure of Bush's vivid imagination, but that's not important here. I'm not trying to create new conservatives; I'm trying to weigh Al Franken's claims against the facts.

Al is especially harsh regarding Bush's environmental policies. I'm not really going to deal with that, either, because there is some great information on the matter available at lyingliar.com. The issue upon which I want to direct my primary focus is that of the Bush tax cuts, and Al's criticisms thereof. Basically, Al's criticisms of the cuts are identical to his criticisms of Reaganomics, which I deal with on my Reaganomics page and my Sean Hannity page. Be sure to check them out for more information, particularly if you're looking for information on Al's famous "payroll tax" argument.

First he splits hairs about the terms "vast" and "by far," when quoting Bush in saying, "By far the vast majority of the help goes to those at the bottom..." Obviously the use of those terms in Bush's speeches is what Mr. O'Reilly would call "spin," meaning, presented in such a way that its connotations favor a certain idea, for the purpose of sending a specific message. All politicians do it. If you pull together all of Gore's speeches, you can find enough spin to knit a quilt. But this is what's interesting. After pointing out Bush's "spin," Al spins a web of his own, but this one far more nefarious. Whereas Bush used hyperbole to illustrate facts, Al used underhanded mathematics to paint a misleading picture of the tax cuts.

Here is what Al says on page 289 of Lies: "As I said before, the bottom 60 percent got 14.7 percent of the tax cut." Take that statement at face value, and it seems that the top forty percent received "by far," the "vast" majority of economic favor, as far as President Bush's tax cuts are concerned. If you have a brain, however, you've probably already stopped and said, "Wait a minute! The people in the highest tax brackets earn the most money! Even if their tax cuts are less by percentage, it's only natural that they will be getting back a lot more in dollars."

Congratulations! If that thought crossed your mind, then you have figured out Al Franken's method of sawing the lady in half. You have exposed his legerdemain and learned his secrets. If you haven't figured it out, let me spell it out for you more clearly. Al Franken has a habit of "refuting" the benefits of supply-side economics by placing percentages in the place of hard numbers, thus skewing the economic bell curve. He has done this numerous times, and it's always the same.

Notice that he says "14.7 percent of the tax cut." This figure is incredibly deceitful, because it sounds as though he's referring to individual tax cuts, but he isn't. He is referring to the whole spectrum. The 14.7 refers to actual dollars distributed, so what he is really saying is that the top 40 percent got the most money back. Okay? Now we've gotten away from the spin and down to the bare logic of the matter. Of course the top 40 percent (and especially the top 10, and 5, and obviously the top 1) got a much higher percentage of actual cash in their refunds, because they earned, "by far," the most money in the first place!

If a poor man receives ten percent of his ten dollars, and a rich man receives five percent of his one hundred dollars, the poor man is getting the better deal, but the rich man is naturally making a lot more money, simply because of his income. Al Franken would present the story in a different way. He would simply say, "The rich man is receiving five times more than the poor man!" Are you starting to see the method, here? Percentages alone are very deceiving, and Al Franken uses them like an old pro. Maybe I'll write a magic book. I'll call it "The Art of Prestidigitation: Al Franken Style!" If you want to try his tricks at home, just be sure to have lots of smoke and mirrors ready.

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