Looking for a book to read for the four-hour train ride back from Boston last weekend, I stopped into the book store at Boston's South Station and settled on "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them," the somewhat controversial new political humor book by Al Franken. After finishing the first half in one sitting and the rest a few days later, I can say that while I've got quite a few objections, I'm glad I read it.

I've got a bit of a mixed relationship to Franken and his work. He's from where I'm from (St. Louis Park, MN), I once met him at a Twins game and found him to be quite a friendly guy, I've enjoyed a great deal of the stuff he wrote and performed on "Saturday Night Live," and absolutely loved his 1996 book "Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot."

But on the other hand, my politics have moved rightward as his have lurched leftward, and it's hard to dispute that Franken's humor these days has a mere fraction of the bite his '70s SNL stuff did- much of which certainly has to do with his split with longtime writing partner Tom Davis. And I also find his tactic of rebutting the "shrill and mean-spirited" tactics of conservatives by being shrill and mean-spirited himself a tad hypocritical. But at any rate, I was sympathetic to Franken during Bill O'Reilly's hysterical lawsuit against him (writing about it here), and so I figured I'd give his book a shot.

The book starts out with all the easy, deserving targets (O'Reilly, Coulter, Bernard Goldberg, Fox News), winning most of the battles decisively and gleefully tearing their arguments to shreds. On the more difficult stuff, however, Franken punts- he devotes short, unconvincing chapters to the Iraq war and the 2000 election, and has just about nothing to say about either the Democratic presidential field or the current crisis in the Democratic party over the role of liberalism in the War on Terror. Franken's "issue" chapters, as a rule, don't ring nearly as true as his shots at various celebrity pundits.