Here’s hoping that the outrage is phony
According to published reports, the GOP is outraged over Al Franken’s jokes with their so-called “out-of-control vitriol.” The WSJ offers some examples of what has the Republican knickers in a twist:
the Republican party isn’t wasting time. Minutes after Mr. Franken declared his candidacy in February, the party released four pages of what it called Mr. Franken’s “mean-spirited and divisive partisan” remarks. Among them: Mr. Franken’s statement, in a New Statesman magazine interview last fall, that Mr. Coleman is “one of the administration’s leading butt boys.”
Mr. Coleman calls the slur “out-of-control vitriol.” Mr. Franken says, “It was meant as a joke. I should have used ‘lap dog’ and I’ve said I will use ‘lap dog’ from now on.” Among the Republicans’ other examples: a proposal to raise money by raffling off former Attorney General Janet Reno as a lap dancer or blasting oldsters into space on pay-per-view TV.
Though some of Franken’s writing does contain words that would have to be bleeped on TV, much of what was featured in the WSJ piece was of this sort, from his address at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 1994:
“the President’s three strikes and you’re out proposal. Which means different things to different people. To Pat Buchanan it means to put a Nazi war criminal away he had to be a guard at three separate camps.”…
“I admire the Vice President tremendously. I mean his advocacy of the Information Superhighway. Which again means different things to different people. To Al Gore it means unemployed aerospace workers accessing a video classroom to retrain themselves for the conversion from a cold war economy to an information economy. To Clarence Thomas it means twenty-four hour a day pornography.”…
“The Vice President continued to prove his commitment to the environment yesterday, when he agreed to change the policy on the stick up his butt. Evidently, instead of replacing the stick every day with a new one, he’s going to keep the same stick there throughout the administration. And if they get re-elected in ’96, that will save an entire rain forest.”
Surely the GOP must have better ways to spend its time than fulminating over Al Franken’s joke and blooper collections. We can only hope that the outrage about Franken’s jokes is synthetic. If this is the element of a potential Al Franken candidacy that generates the outrage among Republicans, they have apparently gotten hold of that stick of Al Gore’s. No doubt this line of attack will work just as effectively as attacking Jim Webb for what he wrote in his novels. The blue stockings need to get a grip, and the Republican strategists need to get a clue. (Final point: judging from some of Mr. Franken’s humor, he might want to consider running for office in Idaho.)