Fresh from the flap over his new book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, our favorite local boy Franken (he’s from St. Louis Park, you know) has never been better—even when he won five Emmys for his work on the original cast and writing staff of Saturday Night Live, or when he won a Grammy for best comedy album in the 1980s, or when he starred as ersatz new-age twelve-stepper Stuart Smalley in the nineties. Perhaps he reestablished himself as a household name by cleverly arranging to be sued by Fox TV, who objected to the subtitle of his book (“A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right”). Fox wisely dropped their suit last month, recognizing that they’d done nothing other than make themselves look ridiculous and guarantee Franken’s place at the top of the New York Times bestseller list. They crowed that Franken could now “return to the obscurity that he is normally accustomed to.” Which only confirmed just how clueless they are. As one wag wrote in a media insider’s prayer, “Dear Lord, please let me some day achieve the level of obscurity currently enjoyed by Al Franken.” Indeed, for three decades, Franken has never been far from primetime TV or the bestseller list. For his latest act, he has taken on the role of a prophet in the wilderness. At a time when the political left is demoralized and exhausted and just about humorless, Franken has become a one-man crusade defending the good name, high ideals, and biting humor of old-fashioned bleeding-heart liberalism. Lies is a delightful deflation of the monopoly conservative pundits have established in broadcast “journalism” in recent years. It also hits close to home, with a deft analysis of what exactly went wrong in the days and weeks after Paul Wellstone died, one year ago.—Editors
The Rake: For Minnesotans, your chapter on how the right-wing punditocracy spun the Wellstone memorial was chilling.
Al Franken: Well, that’s what the chapter is really about. The Republicans’ idea was to take this memorial and use it for political purposes. That by sorting through what was there on the videotape and taking a couple moments that were inappropriate and showing them over and over again, they lied about what the rest of the memorial was about.
You were at the memorial. What did you think?
At a wake you tell funny stories about people, and laugh and celebrate their life. There was a lot of that, and there was also a lot of weeping and sobbing, and cheering. And it was interesting to see that someone like Joe Klein in the New Yorker wrote a piece about it, and his was a more straight-ahead understanding of what happened, what it was. And it was a reflection of Paul. Paul was an advocate for the dispossessed and the poor, and that’s what this thing was about. It looked like a campaign thing, but it was just really, “Carry forward what Paul believed in.” The only actual campaigning—“We’re gonna win,” that kind of thing—came from Rick Kahn and from Mark Wellstone. And Mark Wellstone lost his dad. Lost his mom, and lost his sister.
What was disgusting was that the Republicans kept saying this had been planned to fool everyone. “It was advertised as a memorial but it was just a political rally.” And that they had planned it. Limbaugh was doing a whole thing like this had been planned. Like it wasn’t what it was—which was an event that the kids had a huge part in planning, an event that the speakers who spoke eloquently about all the people who were lost in the crash, the closest people to Paul, his surviving sons—who had just gone through this trauma—had basically organized, approved of everything, and it was a spontaneous thing. Twenty thousand people came to this thing because they wanted to express their grief, and their joy about his life, and celebrate their lives, and that’s what it was. And people like Limbaugh literally said that people had been bused in. That the audience had been planted. He literally said this. “This was a planted crowd.” And what happens is, there is a right-wing media, Fox and Rush Limbaugh, the Washington Times and the New York Post, and they report this horrible outrage. And especially talk radio.
They get people to complain, and that becomes the story, the complaining. And you know, you have someone in Minnesota, Sarah Janecek, who added to the distortion, saying that it was all scripted, and that the proof was that it was on the Jumbotron, what everyone was saying, and that the people were even cued to laugh and applaud. And of course she was referring to the simulcast. She either didn’t understand what a simulcast was, or she didn’t understand what closed-captioning was, which I think is hard to believe, or she was presenting it as something that it wasn’t. Which is sort of in keeping with all the kinds of distortions I heard in the aftermath of the memorial. There’s something very unspiritual about that kind of taking a tragedy and exploiting it. And that’s what they accused the Democrats of doing, but the only way they could accuse the Democrats of doing that was by distorting what happened.
Let me say something positive. There are definitely people of good conscience on both sides who do try to talk to each other. I have a number of friends who are on what I consider the religious right. One of my best friends might say he’s a Christian conservative or a cultural conservative. He and I probably disagree on almost every social issue. But we’re friends. And I’ve been trying, with not a great deal of success, to get him together with people, for example, from the gay and lesbian community, to get him just to see them more as human beings. And I think he would say that gays and lesbians should have basic rights—not be discriminated against in employment and things like that. But you know, he won’t go that far on things like adoption, and that kind of thing, and that’s because of his deeply felt religious views. I disagree with him. But we can have a civil conversation. And I think he’s a sincere and serious person.
I think that there are sincere and serious people on all sides. Like Paul Wellstone went together with Senator Pete Domenici on certain things. There are people on both sides of the political spectrum who can get together and seriously come to a consensus on things and not do the kind of things that Limbaugh does.
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