Air America and Big Fat Idiots

Two books on my library list down: Air America: The Playbook and Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fat Idiot. I'm not entirely satisfied with either of them.

The Air America book didn't have any real problems - I just found it sort of unsatisfying. It's about two years old, and therefore sort of dated, but I wasn't paying a lick of attention to politics two years ago so it was still mostly new stuff. The real problem was that it consists of either fairly fluffy satire pieces and one-page tidbits (like a series on evil corporations presented ironically as good investments,) or transcripts of radio interviews. Don't get me wrong, the radio interviews were neat, but a ten-minute interview takes me a minute and a half to read and really doesn't contain that much information. I think, on the whole, I would have preferred a book about Air America, because from the introduction, there's a story and a half there.

The Al Franken book - well, I picked it up because he's still in the running for Senator of Minnesota, and I don't know a thing about the guy other than that he was on Saturday Night Live. After reading the book I know two things: he's a liberal, and his jokes don't translate to print. Like, at all.

I didn't realize that the "Big Fat" part of the title was the main theme of the book, but fat jokes don't do it for me. It's not one of my hot button issues - I just don't find it funny or ironic or remotely relevant, particularly because their subject, Limbaugh, is a radio personality. I sat there after the first three pages of fat jokes and thought as hard as I could, but could not call to mind even a dim picture of the man. I gather he's a big fella. *shrug*

The rest of it - I guess I just prefer my politics straight. I find having to guess whether a given line is satire or truth more tiring than anything, and I'm already sold on most of his basic premises. I don't regret picking it up - it was a quick read - but I'm not going to rush out and pick up more from this genre.

Next up, Paul Begala's Third Term, which is similar to Franken's in many ways except all the statements and facts have citations and I find the humor much more effective. It reads like a compilation of MSNBC campaign punditry, but it's nice to have it all in one place.