Monthly Archive for October, 2007

No question about it, Al Franken supported the war at the beginning and opposes it today. (Importantly, this is a fact that he has in common with a majority of the American public.) Franken’s early support for the war is a legitimate issue in this campaign, and no one is out of line for talking or writing about it. But if we’re going to look at Al’s record on the war, we have to do it honestly.

The Star Tribune published a story today discussing Al’s position on the war. Its got one big, glaring inaccuracy which can’t be ignored. From the article:

Like many others, Franken was shaken by Sept. 11, 2001. And for all his acid-tongued commentary about the Bush administration, he says he found himself unwilling to believe the president would “mislead this country into war.”I believed the president. I believed [former Secretary of State] Colin Powell,” he said.

In his 2003 book, “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them,” Franken wrote that “I had allowed fear to cloud my normally robust skepticism regarding the veracity of the Bush administration.”

Here is the problem: the passage from the 2003 book was clearly satirical. In the same passage, Al writes about his wife Franni fearing that a cement mixer across the street was actually one of Sadam’s mobile WMD factories.

I’m not trying to excuse Al’s support for the war, but Its just plain inaccurate to suggest that he acted out of fear. Far from a discussion of his support for the war, the passage that the fear quote comes from is an indictment of the politics of fear that the Bush Administration and other war-supporters employed in 2002 and 2003. As he has made abundantly clear, Franken supported the war because he believed that the President and his administration were telling the truth about Iraq, not because he was afraid.

Its an important distinction.

No one wants a United States Senator who votes out of fear — its not good decision making. We would all like to believe, however, that the President of the United States can be trusted to tell the American people the truth about an issue of national importance. This is, after all, America. We like to believe that Nixon was the exception and that Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt are the rule.

Clearly, Al Franken was wrong to believe George W. Bush. But we all decry the state of our national politics and the acrimony and mistrust that characterizes the relations between the two major parties. In fact, MDE and the Republican Party have sought to crucify Al Franken for his partisanship. And that’s why its so unacceptable for the Star Tribune to characterize Al’s support as based on “fear”. If anything, Al’s initial support for the war proves that he is not the knee-jerk partisan that many of his critics suggest he is.

Pat Lopez, who is normally an exceptional reporter (one of the best in the Twin Cities), got this one wrong and the Strib should issue a correction.