The American Spectator

Reader Mail

p> LIVE FROM NEW YORK, IT'S SATURDAY NITRO br> Re: Nicole Russell's Al Frankenstein : /p>

Celebrity candidacies may seem attractive, but they carry some problems. The candidate generally has to have a public image that inspires some measure of confidence in their abilities. Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Clint Eastwood and Fred Thompson were perceived as mature, successful men who were able to communicate ideas, and who had been successful in fields other than acting (Reagan as a union president, Schwarzenegger as an entrepreneur, Eastwood as a producer and director and Thompson as an attorney). Al Franken has never done anything of note outside of writing, and his tenure as head writer of SNL coincided with the decline of the show's quality and viewership. In fact, Franken's body of work can be used against him. His most famous book, Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot, is a collection of sophomoric tirades that alienated as many people as it amused. An excerpt that appeared in Playboy, hardly a bastion of conservativism, received uniformly negative mail due to its childish attacks on what he perceived as conservative "Chicken Hawks." It was full of scatological jokes and cheap shots and prompted one letter writer to ask if it had been written by Franken's child. Appearing live on Politically Incorrect during the '96 election cycle as the liberal counterpoint to Arianna Huffington (now there's a blast from the past), his comments to LTC Oliver North were so offensive that Bill Maher felt the need to apologize to LTC North on the air prior to any response from the public. These and other incidents and comments are easily researched and will provide easy fodder for any campaign.

p>But, it is as head writer on SNL that Franken is most vulnerable. The obvious decline in the writing of the show and its loss of viewers should demonstrate Franken's inability to manage a small group of writers, much less a Senate staff, and Franken's notoriously thin skin will not help him when these facts are presented to him, and nothing turns off the electorate faster than a good public tantrum. br> -- Mike Harris br> MAJ, US Army. /p>

Great article by Nicole Russell on Mr. Air America himself. And a perfect photograph accompanying it. You see how you turn out after years of dropping LSD in order to write those stupid skits for Saturday Night Live with Tom Davis ages ago? You become an idiot-stick liberal like Franken.

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