The Loser Now Will Be Later To Win

Franken has spent his life as a sort of intellectual terrorist...

very, VERY poor choice of words. Simply because Franken defied "convention" doesn't give you, or anyone, a reason to describe him as a terrorist of any sort....

It's odd how Scherer remembers Franken.
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I remember the Paul Simon and Pat Robertson impersonations, Stuart Smalley, When a Man Loves a Woman, etc...

An intellectual terrorist who has done a noble and brilliant job? What do you exactly mean by an intellectual terrorist? Granted that Franken's path to the Senate isn't the conventional one, a healthy dose of satire seems exactly what is needed by the staid old institution.

I think it's a good thing in the sense that the Senate is too heavily comprised of men and women with a certain temperament that often trumps their world view. Even if Franken is inappropriate and wrong, he brings a balance to the institution that makes it more accurately reflect the tensions of the nation it seeks to govern.

He loves his country deeply, he's significantly more hawkish than the average blogger and he's built his entire career around calling people liars. He'll be nothing if not refreshing.

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Scherer: Set aside the fact...Ignore for a moment...
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Then why mention those things at all, Michael?
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MS -- How come no mention of Franken at the Gridiron dinner in the 1990s? His memorable satirization of a rebuffed Newt Gingrich's attempt to sit in the front of Air Force One because there was a zoo (a Gingrich special interest) in the front of the air craft was made more hilarious, by the stony looks and silence of GOP's elite during his monologue.
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And what about his support of the troops by going on several USO tours of Irag, Kuwait and Afganistan?

An 'intellectual terrorist'?
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Why couldn't he have just been respectable like that beloved pill popping 'comedian' Rush Limbaugh (who brought us 'Barack the Magic Negro')?
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'It will be fun to see what happens next.'.
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Yes it will be. It could also be great. Senators are going to have to earn respect from Al. It won't automatically be given out of 'respect for the office'.

Expect the junior Senator from Minnesota to be held "in minimum high regard"* by his Senate colleague for a while.
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*minimum high regard = "I can't stand him" by a fellow US Senator.

"Intellectual terrorist"? Mikey, you need some more time off. Maybe put down that bong your own self.
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Andy: Depends which colleagues you're referring to. He did a lot of fund-raising and, and his radio show, promotion for Democrats. Including Lieberman.

Whatever committee assignments he gets, his performance during hearings should be very interesting and amusing (while being substantive, I expect). Stuart Smalley and "RL is a big Fat Idiot" and "lying liars..." as firmly grounded performance pieces are hard to top.

I expect Franken is a serious person, and it will also be interesting to watch how he finesses a transition into his new pretty serious job. Maybe he can be McCain's new bipartisan maverick buddy (shove that phony Lieberman to the side -- don't you think Franken could do a hilarious Lieberman? Can't you easily imagine it?)

Andy from MA wrote: 'And what about his support of the troops by going on several USO tours of Irag, Kuwait and Afganistan?'
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Excellent point.
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Most people are unaware of the fact that Senator Franken has been one of the most active celebrities participating in USO tours. He has appeared in shows repeatedly in the war zones to entertain the troops. While many chicken hawks pay lip service to 'supporting the troops', Senator Franken has risked his own hide to actually do it.

...and no mention of his torrid affair with Jeanne Kirkpatrick back in the Studio 54 days, as revealed in the introduction of the second edition of "Rush Limbaugh Is A Big, Fat Idiot"?

Harry Reid = Mike Myers.

In what lexicon does satirist=terrorist?

Well, Michael answered before my question appeared. But I'm still not buying.
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The satire=terrorism equation might work in some academic setting where everyone agrees you meant it only in the most intellectual of ways. That ain't this place.
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In this very public forum, terrorism means people who blow up soldiers and children's schools. Maybe MS meant well or was exercising his literary muscles. It sure didn't come off that way.

Jim, FL: If preview had been my friend, I would have written Republican senate colleagues.

Michael - the fact that you've used the word terrorist before to describe the art of satire and sarcasm does not make it a good word choice. Don't step on your own point with this kind of distraction. It's perfectly adequate and accurate to suggest he's a rebel and has promoted a revolutionary view of how we see things.
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What's the point of suggesting somebody's a terrorist but not the kind that "actually hurts, terrorizes or kills people?" Um, that's what a terrorist is. You can say a little kid is a terror, you might even be able to say he terrorizes the neighborhood, but you can't call him a terrorist. That's a reserved word, now. And when you use it of an elected official you're way outside the permissible boundary for that word.
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Otherwise I agree with how fascinating this is. Though I think we laugh at Franken and his ilk mostly because something similar has occurred to us and we wouldn't say it. Our unedited thoughts wouldn't befit a whole lot of settings. It will be interesting to see if Franken can curb his public expressions of that humor. Bet it livens up the cloakroom though.

davemc 321 perhaps those literary muscles have atrophied a bit since MS came to Swampland.
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MS based on your own definition would you stipulate that when Newt Gingrich first came to Washington he was a political terrorist?

Prior use doesn't justify bad writing or shallow thought. Guerrilla comedian, perhaps? No reason at all to use the 't' word here other than laziness, sensationalism, and/or lax editorial standards.

The faux controversy over that Rooney joke is interesting to read, given how the election turned out. Would Fox News and the Republicans accuse Franken of being in favor of eating people, and insensitivity to Jeffrey Dahmer's victims, if the putative skit were about cannibalism? Of course not. But anything, anything to find the slightest deviation from politically correct stereotypes and demonize someone. Humor is humor, no more and no less.

The "intellectual terrorism" comment was perfectly clear. If you didn't get it, that's your problem not MS's.
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Roger Ebert's beautifully written post on the new "Age of Credulity" touches on this issue (MS, I suspect you'd really appreciate it): http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2008/09/this_is_the_dawning_of_the_age.html

MS, I will save my ire for a more appropriate subject. I get it now.

Franken has spent his life as a sort of intellectual terrorist, a rebel in open war with the mores and power structures of America.

"Intellectual terrorism" was the stock in trade of Neoconservatism, and they owned think tanks fueled buy billionaires, with the ear of every Republican president since Reagan. Here's Irving Kristol:

[The] New Class is not easily defined, but may be vaguely described. It consists of a goodly proportion of those college educated people whose skills and vocations proliferate in a 'post-industrial society'... We are talking about scientists, teachers and educational administrators, journalists and others in the communication industries, psychologists, social workers, those lawyers and doctors who make their career in the expanding public sector, city planners and the staffs of the larger foundations and upper levels of the government bureaucracy, and so on. It is by now a quite numerous class; it is an indispensable class for our type of society; it is a disproportionately powerful class; it is also an ambitious and frustrated class. [Wow. Scientists? Teachers? Journalists? All commie hippies? That's a lot of suspect professions.]
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... they are acting upon a hidden agenda: to propel the nation from that modified version of capitalism we call 'the welfare state' toward an economic system so stringently regulated in detail as to fulfil many of the traditional anti-capitalist aspirations of the Left.

Yup. So give me your money corporate billionaires, sez Kristol, or the hippie commies take over.
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Here's Paul Krugman commenting on Perlstein's Nixonland:

Here's what the book doesn't say, which isn't a criticism. What happened, very crucially, was that Nixonism got institutionalized. The creation of a set of institutions - think-tanks, media organizations, all of it funded by a relatively small number of sources (it really comes down to about six angry billionaires, when all is said and done), creating a structure which perpetuates the political style and political goals that were created during these years. Rick has written a lot about the American Enterprise Institute, but not here - AEI was transformed into what we know today towards the end of the period that Rick covers here. The Heritage Foundation is founded in the last two years covered in this book. Those things create an institutional basis for maintaining this style of politics, and then what happens thereafter, is that although the objective reality of urban riots and hippies and anti-war protesters is gone, they are able to find, to conjure up the appearance of equivalents thereafter.

As David Roberts wrote, "Beware the Dirty Hippies!" Be terrified. Be very terrified.