America Rising Read Al Franken's Book So You Don't Have To

America Rising Read Al Franken’s Book So You Don’t Have To

Senator Al Franken (D-MN) is just the latest Senate Democrat to use a new book as a trial run for a 2020 campaign. Like Elizabeth Warren before him though, his book is getting panned. Reviewing the book for the New York Times, Molly Ball called it “the story of how Franken became a giant phony.” […]

June 1, 2017

Senator Al Franken (D-MN) is just the latest Senate Democrat to use a new book as a trial run for a 2020 campaign. Like Elizabeth Warren before him though, his book is getting panned. Reviewing the book for the New York Times, Molly Ball called it “the story of how Franken became a giant phony.” Ball added that Franken’s book was nothing more than a “stale recitations of liberal talking points”:

“Still, Franken’s clever asides can’t always salvage his stale recitations of liberal talking points, which seem likely to persuade precisely no one who isn’t already a member of the choir. (Even with jokes, is anyone buying this book because he wants to read a seven-page argument against media consolidation?)”

Given this awful review, America Rising thought we’d do everyone a favor and read through the book so that you don’t have to. Here are some of the things we found:

Franken joined a growing list of Democrats who now have no problems taking shots at Barack Obama:

“But Candidate Obama, or at least the Obama campaign, was extremely unhelpful. After our Minneapolis rally, Hillary was heading up to the Range for a rally for Obama in Hibbing. Amy and I joined her on the flight. Only the Obama campaign wouldn’t allow me on the stage, so Hillary and Amy and Congressman Jim Oberstar would just point to me and say nice things about me, and I’d stand up in the crowd and wave. Awkward.”

On multiple occasions, Franken defends lobbyists in his new book. Franken even said that he was on the “same team” as some lobbyists:

“And while lobbying – and all the money associated with it – offers lots of opportunities for corruption, lobbying itself isn’t inherently corrupt. Many lobbyists represent good causes, like solar energy or Alzheimer’s research or a woman’s reproductive rights. They may have donated to you not in order to buy your support going forward, but because you’ve been supporting their good cause all along. And more often than not, you’re not meeting with them because of a check they wrote, but rather because you’re on the same team. You’re strategizing together about how to move the ball forward, and trading useful information about how to achieve a shared goal.”

Franken advocated for a single-payer health care system in his book:

“If this sounds like a complicated way to solve the problem, well, it is. A simpler solution would have been to just go to a national single-payer plan like Canada’s Medicare for everyone. And many progressives, like Bernie Sanders, thought that’s what we should do back in 2009. Unfortunately, we needed sixty votes to pass anything, and we were, oh, about fifty votes short.”

In a hilarious display of cognitive dissonance though, Franken acknowledged that Obamacare has many flaws:

“And, yes, some people have gotten the short end of the stick when it comes to the new law… Anyone who has to pay unreasonably high premiums or copays and whose income is just a little too much to qualify for a subsidy that could help has every right to be angry.”

Franken, who received over $800,000 from the entertainment industry during his first campaign, was defensive over his close ties to Hollywood:

“One of the things Norm Coleman attacked me for during that first campaign was that I received a lot of campaign money from the Left Coast Hollywood Elite, who are poisoning our culture and contributing to the breakdown of the American family. And, indeed, over the years I’ve gotten a lot of support from people in show business, especially people I worked with over my thirty-five years in the industry.”

Finally, Franken joined an expanding number of Democrats who have no problem talking about their past drug use:

“For my part, I never really got into trouble with drugs. I used to say, ‘I only did cocaine so I could stay up late enough to make sure nobody else did too much cocaine,’ which was a joke, but not too far from the truth. For whatever reason, I never became addicted. There but for the grace of God go I.”