{"id":26773,"date":"2009-07-07T21:40:59","date_gmt":"2009-07-07T21:40:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/gregladen\/2009\/07\/07\/i-give-you-senator-al-franken\/"},"modified":"2009-07-07T21:40:59","modified_gmt":"2009-07-07T21:40:59","slug":"i-give-you-senator-al-franken","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/2009\/07\/07\/i-give-you-senator-al-franken\/","title":{"rendered":"I give you Senator Al Franken"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here is Al Franken being sworn in to the U. S. Senate:
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\nDo you remember The Ad? The ad that made everyone in Minnesota who kinda didn’t like Norm Coleman go over the line and realize that Norm Coleman is the scum of the earth? You can read about that here <\/a>but I’ll summarize it for you briefly and tell you why I even bring it up.<\/p>\n

When Al Franken was running for the Senate, he would often tell a particular story about Paul Wellstone. In this story, Senator Wellstone is running along side his son, who is, in turn, running second or third in a cross country race as part of his high school track team. Paul, known for his energy, is running along side his son for the entire race. And near the end, he moves in close, running sideways along side Junior and encouraging him. Franken, at this point in the story, imitates Wellstone running sideways, flapping his arms and yelling “You can do it! You can take him! You can do it! You can take him!”<\/p>\n

This is a funny, engaging, and indeed poignant story. For those of you who don’t know, Senator Paul Wellsone was widely loved by Minnesotans, he died an untimely and violent death while Senator, we ran a good Democrat to take over his seat but stupidity prevailed and Norm Coleman took Wellstone’s seat. In essence, Franken is taking back Wellstone’s seat from Coleman. When I’ve seen Franken tell this story it brought tears to my eyes, and that was true of everyone in the room.<\/p>\n

Then, the fuck-head Republicans did the worst thing they could do. They took video of Franken telling this wonderful and engaging story … the part where he is imitating a father encouraging his son at a race … and cut that into an ad that made Franken look like a raving maniac, telling voters that if Franken won the election he’d soon get busy yelling at them and being a violent freak of some kind.<\/p>\n

They were caught. They were embarrassed, I think, but they never did apologize. And they will never live it down.<\/p>\n

But that did not stop them from using the same footage again. For reasons that are beyond me, the swearing in of Al Franken to his justly earned Senate Seat prompted the Republican Fuckwads to make an anti-Al Franken ad for Youtube, and it uses that same footage.<\/p>\n

Hey, Republicans. In case you didn’t notice. We can see you. In fact, the whole world is watching.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here is Al Franken being sworn in to the U. S. Senate:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[828,208,4681,4812,306],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5fhV1-6XP","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26773"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26773"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26773\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}