Posted on 08/14/2003 4:22:21 AM PDT by harpu
FRANKEN IS NEITHER A JOURNALIST nor a television news personality,” reads the trademark lawsuit filed this week by the Fox News Channel against leftist humorist Al Franken.
“He is not a well-respected voice in American politics,” the complaint continues. “Rather, he appears to be shrill and unstable. His views lack any serious depth or insight.”
At the heart of this lawsuit are three words, “fair and balanced.” Fox, part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, says it registered “Fair & Balanced” (using an ampersand, a symbol meaning “and”) as a trademark in 1995 and has spent the equivalent of $41 million since then promoting this slogan as a brand by which viewers identify its channel.
Franken and Penguin Books are scheduled next month to publish his latest book, the title of which is Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.
The book’s cover pictures Franken in what appears to be a television network control room. It depicts TV monitors, in one of which the face of Fox News star Bill O’Reilly is seen – just beneath the book title word “Lies.”
Fox lawyers say that this cover “mimics the look and style” of two best-selling books by O’Reilly. (According to Matt Drudge, O’Reilly “lobbied” his network to sue Franken, with whom he had verbal fisticuffs recently at the annual convention of the American Booksellers Association.)
The lawsuit argues that by expropriating Fox’s trademark and using O’Reilly’s image and book cover style, Mr. Franken intended to deceive people into buying his book. This would “blur and tarnish” the journalistic good name of Fox News Channel.
“The court papers,” writes the New York Times, “refer to Mr. Franken…as a ‘parasite’ who hopes to use Fox’s reputation to confuse the public and boost sales of his book.”
The Fox lawsuit and attendant publicity have sent advance orders for Franken’s book to the #1 spot at Amazon.com, a result Bill O’Reilly surely did not want. In this slow news season, the lawsuit has turned Franken’s book into a big topic on talk radio and talking head TV, as well as in columns like this one. Franken is laughing all the way to the bank.
“From everything I know about the law regarding satire, I’m not worried,” said Franken from a vacation site in Italy. “When I read [that I was described as] ‘intoxicated or deranged’…in their complaint, I thought for a moment I was a Fox commentator.
“And by the way,” Franken continued, “a few months ago, I trademarked the word ‘funny.’ So when Fox calls me ‘unfunny,’ they’re violating my trademark. I am seriously considering a countersuit.”
So who is Al Franken, and why is he worth this attention that will sell yet more of his books and boost his speaking fees?
Al Franken grew up in flatland Minnesota, the land of the loon and 10,000 taxes and a very, very liberal Democratic Party that spawned Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale and Paul Wellstone. He is a graduate of Harvard College. Married for more than 20 years, he is father to a son and daughter.
In 1975 Lorne Michaels hired Franken and partner Tom Davis as writers for a strange new TV show called “Saturday Night Live” (SNL). In his early years with SNL, Franken reportedly has acknowledged, he was “not addicted” but was a user of mind-altering drugs, including LSD and cocaine. They also performed on-air skits as “The Franken & Davis Show.”
Transcripts of those skits, which reveal Franken’s deepest core values, can be hard to find. A synopsis of one that aired October 21, 1978, during the show’s fourth season, reads: “Franken and Davis are International Communist revolutionaries, calling for the overthrow of the U.S. gov’t – they act out the campaign of two corrupt nominees for congress.”
In another, the transcript of a 1978-aired “Saturday Night Live” skit co-authored and approved by Franken includes this inserted message by an announcer: “’The Franken & Davis Show’ is brought to you by the International Communist Party: Sooner or later, you’ll be a Communist. And now…here’s Al & Tom.”
Yes, the Court Jester Al Franken would smile at this and say, “Laugh it up, folks. These are the jokes.”
But what if this fake ad had said instead: “brought to you by the International Nazi Party: Sooner or later, you’ll be a Nazi.” Would that be a laughing matter?
Socialist Adolf Hitler murdered 12 million people, including six million Jews, in his concentration and death camps. Soviet socialists murdered 17 million people by systematic starvation in the Ukraine alone. According to the Black Book of Communism, over the past 100 years Communist governments in Russia, China, Cuba, Eastern Europe and elsewhere have murdered at least 100 million human beings. (Most serious scholars concur.)
As the luminous P.J. O’Rourke has said, liberalism is just Communism sold by the drink. Because Al Franken’s socialist politics different only in degree from those of the late Soviet Union, he took delight in praising Communism repeatedly in his skits on “Saturday Night Live.” Laugh it up, folks. Sooner or later, you’ll be a Communist.
Given his politics, Franken prospered in the leftist intellectual fever swamps of New York City. He has won five Emmys and the 1997 Grammy for Best Comedy Album. He was a commentator for leftist CNN at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. In 1992, he anchored Comedy Central’s “Indecision ’92.” In 1994 and 1996 he was main humorous speaker at the White House Correspondents Dinner.
In 1996, Al Franken was co-commentator with “Strange Bedfellow” (and was even pictured in bed with) token “conservative” Arianna Huffington [actually a fellow leftist whose mother fought with a Communist-led resistance movement in World War II Greece] on ABC’s “Politically Incorrect.” [Its fired host Bill Maher, now on HBO, pretends to be a “Libertarian,” but he is a fundraiser performer for the Democratic Party.]
Fox’s lawyers are correct, however, to say that Franken’s TV stardom has faded. In 1998 and 1999 NBC gave the aging comic a late night spot called “Lateline,” which drew leftist praise but poor ratings. The show was soon cancelled.
Franken also tried his screenwriting, doing a movie based on his SNL helpless self-help dweeb character Stuart Smalley. The 1995 Paramount flick “Stuart Saves His Family” got two (left) thumbs up from Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert but died at the box office. His 1994 movie “When a Man Loves A Woman” about alcoholism’s effect on marriage did slightly better, perhaps because it starred Meg Ryan and refugee from Communist Cuba Andy Garcia.
Franken has had less success in Hollywood than almost any other star known to the built-in audience from “Saturday Night Live.”
But Franken has been more successful with books, beginning with Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations. Other titles include Oh, The Things I Know! A Guide to Success, or, Failing That, Happiness and his wisdom from goofy Stuart Smalley, I’m Good Enough, I’m Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Me!
The book that may reveal the most about Franken’s psyche is Why Not Me? The Inside Story of the Making and Unmaking of the Franken Presidency.
Like many who live by making jokes, Franken thinks he is smarter than those elected to govern the United States. (This is in the spirit of George Burns, who once said: “It’s too bad that all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxicabs and cutting hair.”)
In 2000, Franken did speechwriting for Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Al Gore, while 35-year-old feminist Naomi Wolfe was dressing Gore in earth tones like her own boy Barbie doll.
For Franken, an ardent leftist, the experience must have been remarkable. He was invited to fill Gore’s head with Franken ideas and witticisms. And, as his book title implies, Franken must have found himself thinking: “I’m a lot smarter than this Doofus, who could become President of the United States!”
It must be heartbreaking for Al Franken to be allowed to sit catching crumbs near the King’s table in the Democratic Party because he so fashionably wears the clown costume and bells of the Court Jester. But all the while Franken hungers to be the King’s chief policymaker – or even the King himself.
(Subservient to the Democratic Party Line, Franken probably cheered this week when Nader got a pie in the face, probably from a Democrat operative furious over the 92,000 Nader Florida votes that cost Al Gore the presidency in 2000 and eager to make Nader appear ridiculous before 2004.)
Pity Al Franken, with his life falling between two stools. Comedy made him famous, but it also prevents him from ever being taken seriously. He is fanciful, but for that very reason is too unrealistic for realpolitik. And now, with ambition and an obsolete, sourlLeftist ideology gnawing at his gut like a hungry gerbil, Franken is becoming too nasty, spiteful and hateful even to be funny.
The one thing that will give his new book a measure of success is that it speaks to a similar frustration and spite among other failed zealots of the Democratic Party and related loony leftists who cannot accept that capitalism has won, that Republicans will remain in power for the foreseeable future, that their beloved Soviet Union has gone down the garbage disposal of history. Filled with irrational hate and rage, they will rush to buy the book of someone like Franken willing to throw envious insults at President George W. Bush and the others who have left the Left behind.
Franken-politics, as others say of Franken-foods, is a mutant breed. Al Franken has become a crank, a ranting aging demagogue who wound up on the losing side of history and now verbally flails moronically as, with each passing day, his political and intellectual impotence become more obvious.
On their biggest lawsuit issue, the Fox lawyers are absolutely right: you are a parasite, Al Franken. All socialists are, for they depend on theft to provide the wealth they then redistribute – with much of it going into their own pockets. Fox succeeded in making its brand valuable. You now want to expropriate some of that value for yourself by mimicking and mocking it. Rather than build a house yourself, you force your way into the house somebody else constructed with years of hard labor.
The larger lesson here, as Jacob Bronowski wrote in The Ascent of Man about Genghis Khan’s marauding horde, is that thieves like you always fail in the end. The reason is that you do not plant trees or create wealth or generate ideas that improve the lot of humankind. You only steal what others have earned.
Al Franken is what he and fellow socialists, by Freudian projection, accuse capitalists of being – mosquitoes that live by stealing the blood of others, parasites. In Bronowski’s phrase, you ultimately are empty and worthless, like the whirlwind.
That is what we need to recognize as the nature of every socialist down through history. But to Al Franken’s credit, he does write books that people pay for voluntarily. He has made himself very wealthy by selling junky, derivative ideas, but people have been willing to buy them. Sooner or later maturity will arrive, Al Franken, and you’ll be a capitalist.
From his so-called books Rush Limbaugh is a big fat idiot, and his new one, to this comment...all he does is name call & demean. SOP of the left.
He is a washed up, once was kinda funny, HAS BEEN who nobody listens to.
Somehow, it all fits, doesn't it?
I thought Algore's speechwriter was Baron Munchausen. ;^)
I thought is was the brothers Grimm.
Ann Coulter Is A Tall Skinny Slut
George Bush is a Dumb Texas Doofus
Jesus Never Did Anything For Me
Why I Hate Walmart
Condi Rice Is Racist
Bob Hope Was A Womanizing Cad
Actually that was a pretty good movie. Happens to be one of my wife's favorites. I had no idea Franken wrote the thing...
Bill Clinton is honest.
Hillary is nice.
Carville is smart.
Sheesh! You gave him $12.00??? You shouldn't have, since you gave him fair warning!
Good job, otherwise, though...
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