Posted on 10/14/2003 12:42:10 AM PDT by garmonbozia
Al Franken is literally breathless.
He's talking a mile a minute and sounding like a kid who's just arrived home victorious after a schoolyard brawl.
And in a way, he has.
Franken's just learned that his book, the controversial, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, has unseated Bill O'Reilly's tome atop the best-seller list of The New York Times.
"We're very, very happy here today. I was No. 1 for the first five weeks and then he had it last week - for that one bright, shining moment of Camelot," says a sarcastic Franken, who instantly breaks into a song from Camelot.
For Franken, the achievement marks an important win in what has become a very public war with the right. In August, the Fox News Channel fired the first salvo. The network filed suit against Franken and his publisher, claiming his use of the term "Fair and Balanced" infringed upon Fox's trademark of the phrase. In its suit, Fox described the author as "unstable," "shrill" and "not a well-respected voice in American politics."
Franken didn't lose any sleep over the legal action. "I knew they'd lose and they'd create a tremendous amount of publicity," he says matter-of-factly.
Indeed, a federal judge refused Fox's request to block Franken from using the slogan and the network later dropped the suit.
"The judge said you'd have to be a moron to be confused (about the title)," laughs Franken, recalling the ruling during a recent phone interview.
But the brouhaha helped Lies capture the top spot on Amazon.com before it was published. Crafted with cutting wit, the book skewers some of the right's highest-profile voices. Fox News Channel personalities Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity fall prey to Franken's pen, along with political pundit Ann Coulter and nearly every top official in the Bush administration.
Consider the former Saturday Night Live scribe's portrait of White House adviser Karl Rove: "A man whose fleshy and formless physique belies a heart as cold and steely and deadly as a discarded refrigerator with the door still attached."
To drive the point home, Franken adds in a footnote: "In an elementary school playground during a Minnesota winter."
Lies is littered with such acerbic attacks, but Franken is also deadly serious about the book's message, which is essentially about motivating voters to boot Bush out of the White House.
"My hope is to take back the country and restore sanity to domestic policies," he says with the passion of a college freshman at his first political rally. "This is of great concern to me and it should be to everyone."
To bolster his case, Franken assembled a squad of student researchers from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, where he recently served as a fellow. Dubbed TeamFranken, the group was crucial in providing Lies with more credibility.
To some degree, the book has turned Franken into the left's new poster boy. Thousands have flocked to book signings (he's in Denver Thursday at the Tattered Cover LoDo), jamming book stores and even churches to hear Franken evangelize. He's also in talks to host a talk show on a new, liberal radio network being formed by Chicago venture capitalists.
"I'm energizing the choir," Franken claims. "People are thanking me and telling me they were feeling isolated and alone."
The Democratic National Committee recruited him to speak at a $2,500-per-seat tribute dinner for the 2004 presidential candidates. Even Bruce Springsteen plugged Lies on his recent world turn and introduced Franken to 50,000 cheering fans at Shea Stadium in New York.
"In a way it ruined the whole show for me," says Franken of the appearance, which he learned about from Springsteen shortly before the concert. "He said he had this funny bit planned. So, then I started getting nervous and I kept thinking, 'I wonder if they'll boo me.' "
Franken may be bracing for the boos, but so far, his views haven't drawn much of an outcry. Even his book signings have been surprisingly heckler-free. By delivering his opinions with humor, Franken might be protecting himself.
"Al Franken is very, very wrong, but he's also very funny and enjoyable,' acknowledges Jon Caldara, president of the Independence Institute. But Caldara adds that Franken sometimes crosses the line.
"I think it's hysterical that he's out there claiming that the right are a bunch of liars, when he was the one who put together a fraudulent letter to Ashcroft," contends Caldara.
Indeed, Franken was forced to apologize after writing letters to the attorney general and 26 other senior Bush officials (on Harvard letterhead) asking each to share their personal accounts of abstinence for a book on public abstinence programs titled, Savin It. ("I hope you can find time to inspire the next generation of sex-free leaders," wrote Franken in the letter's closing.)
In the book, Franken confesses that the letter yielded a few polite regrets but not one abstinence story.
"I don't think it's malicious," says Franken of his tactics. "In Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot, I wrote a chapter called 'Fair Mean Vs. Unfair Mean' and I think I am only mean when it's fair."
And it's clear the author classifies the shouting match that erupted between himself and O'Reilly at a large book expo last May as "fair mean."
"My wife, watching on television three thousand miles away, thought that Bill was going to jam the pen through my eyeball and into my brain," recalls Franken in the book. "But I was having fun. Not because I enjoy attacking people gratuitously. But because O'Reilly is a bully and he deserved it."
And that might explain why a day after learning about his book's re-emergence at the top of the heap, Franken sounds like a newly-minted prizefighter looking for another scuffle.
Al Franken
• When and where: 7:30 p.m., Thursday, Tattered Cover LoDo, 1628 16th Street Mall.
• Cost: Free tickets available starting at 6:30 p.m.
• Information: 303-436-1070 or www.tatteredcover.com
No, that's Alecs Baldwin and he's using chest hair.
Assner is sending his sweaters to Afghanistan to keep "disaffected freedom fighters" warm. Don't tell him but they are being diverted to Saudi where they are disassembled and rewoven into beards for follically challenged clerics.
I have no television but it seems they don't understand him in Russia either!
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