From writing best-selling books to hosting a national radio show, Al Franken says he is doing his part to trample what he calls right-wing propaganda in America.
On Friday, he’ll bring those efforts to the area with an airing of his three-hour radio show Friday from the Lane Community College Performance Hall. The show, which will be broadcast in front of a live audience, starts at 9 a.m.
“It’s fun. It’s actually nice,” Franken said of the live studio shows, during a phone interview on Wednesday. He said he has done about 30 live shows around the country. “There is a lot of energy in the room – it’s great to have the crowd there.”
Franken was given a list of Oregon favorites to have as guests on the show, said Liz Kelly of KOPT, the Eugene affiliate to Air America, which airs Franken’s show five days a week. He said Mayor Kitty Piercy will be on the show, as will members from The Hemlock Society, an organization founded in 1980 that launched the campaign for assisted suicide. Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act was recently challenged and then upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.
“If someone is terminally ill and wants to go out at a certain time, that’s their right,” Franken said.
Franken became popular as a writer and comedian for “Saturday Night Live” but has since taken aim at bringing down the what he calls the false nature of America’s conservatives. He wrote “Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot” in 1996. In 2003, he wrote “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right,” a book in which Franken mocked right-wingers including President Bush’s administration, writer Ann Coulter and television personality Bill O’Reilly. His latest book is “The Truth (with jokes).” He is part of a growing industry of comedy mixed with politics that, he said, is a threat to the right wing.
“I think they do everything they can to try to disparage us in any way,” Franken said. “I think that to some degree satirists are more free to get to things – they’re able to cut to the truth through human.
“Look at ‘The Daily Show.’ It has incredible power,” he said.
Franken said he doesn’t target any particular audience, but admits that liberals are his main audience, with his consistent attacks on the conservative media and the Bush administration. He said he thinks President Bush’s biggest mistake was first allowing Sept. 11 to happen and then squandering the chance to unite the nation.
“Instead of being a leader and using this unique moment in time when Americans were so together, and the world was behind us, to lead the country and the world into this sort-of new century … he hijacked 9/11 for his own political purpose,” Franken said.
There has been talk of Franken running for U.S. Senate in 2008, but his mind still isn’t made up, he said. There are a lot of factors to consider before making a final decision, such as whether he’d be a viable candidate, whether he could raise the money, or if it would be more important to maintain his radio show, he said.
“It’d be very odd. I’m a comedian.”
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