Doesn’t look like I’m going to get to talk with him.

He’s doing Michael Medved’s radio show right on radio row, and the two of them are about to come to blows. Best I can understand, Franken was under the impression Medved was inviting him on for a one-on-one. Franken comes over (it’s about twenty feet from where Franken was doing his own show), and apparently Medved had booked Swiftboat Vet John O’Neill on to debate him. So Franken’s apoplectic. And there’s a crowd of starstruck College Republicans gathering to take in the spectacle.

UPDATE: It’s hard to take a side on this one. It was sleazy of Medved to dupe Franken. But if Franken’s got the goods on O’Neill (and I suspect he does), why not go head-to-head with him? My guess is that Franken wasn’t up to snuff on his Swift Boat talking points, given that the election’s been old news for months. I like Franken, though he’s wrong most of the time. He’s funny, and he’s smart. What I’ve read of his last book was actually very good. A screed, but a well-researched, well-articulated screed. But he needs to lighten up. Seems like he’s looking to knock the vocabularly out of some smarmy Republican about once a month now (didn’t he almost scrap with Laura Ingraham’s producers awhile back?). Al, go back to being the smart, funny liberal. It’s what we libertarians call your comparative advantage. The world has enough angry leftists. And angry chatting heads of any political persuasion, for that matter.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 18th, 2005 at 3:13 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.