I’ve just finished reading Al Franken’s new book, The Truth (with Jokes).

It’s better, I think, than his previous book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, and that book was pretty good.

Franken is not a reporter. He’s not uncovering new Republican scandals. Rather, he takes stories that have already been reported and puts them together very effectively to show the depth of hypocrisy, incompetence, and malice of the Bush administration and its apologists in Congress. Despite the jokes mentioned in the title, it’s a serious book. The jokes aren’t laugh-out-loud funny (although I did laugh out loud a couple times). Mostly they serve as a sort of safety valve. Without them, many readers might collapse sobbing after learning just how bad Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, DeLay, Frist and their ilk really are.

From a chapter about the Iraq war, Franken summarizes:

Let’s face it. You can’t count on them to give you straight information. You can’t count on them to tell us straight why we’re going to war. You can’t count on them to tell us what’s happening over there.

You can’t count on them to do their homework. To keep track of our money. You can’t count on them to punish war profiteers. You can’t count on them to protect our troops.

You can’t rely on them for much of anything. Armor. Veterans’ benefits. You can’t count on them for the true story of how Jessica Lynch was captured, or how Pat Tillman died. Even for how the “Mission Accomplished” sign went up on the USS Abraham Lincoln. They actually lied about that.

You can’t count on them to count terrorist attacks. You can’t count on them to count civilian victims. You can’t count on them to listen to military commanders and send in enough troops, or not to lie about the commanders asking them to send more troops, or to listen to Colin Powell and not torture people, or to not lie about whether the torture policies started at the top.

You can’t trust them to care. About Iraqis. About Americans.

You can’t trust them to do the work of actually signing killed-in-action letters. You can’t trust them not to lie about not signing killed-in-action letters.

You can’t count on them to acknowledge any mistakes whatsoever. You can’t trust them not to lie when confronted with those mistakes.

You can’t trust them not to believe their own propaganda.

You can’t trust them. Period.

…

If you want to know what I think we should do in Iraq, it’s that we should think about what we have to do in America. We have to throw these guys out.