Salon interviews Al Franken:

So this is the mindset of the right, that they have to punish you. Joe Wilson, the former Gabon ambassador, was sent to Niger by the CIA and came back and said the uranium claims weren't true. And when the controversy started broiling again about the 16 words in the State of the Union address and Wilson wrote the piece in New York Times, senior administration officials blew the cover on his wife, who was a covert [CIA] operative. And it jeopardized the lives not only of her contacts but every American, because she was a covert agent in weapons of mass destruction. And it's a way of intimidating other analysts who might come forward, and there's a parallel here: You will be punished if you come after us.

I really think the Wilson thing is the most disgraceful action of any White House since Iran Contra.

More than Clinton and Monica?

There's a difference between getting a blow job and lying about it, and blowing a national security asset.

Then why do you think there's this current defeatist meme among liberals that none of the current Democratic presidential candidates are capable of beating Bush? Do you agree with them?

No, because I think people are catching on -- if you look at the latest Newsweek poll the president has 44 percent reelect, the lowest since before 9/11, and you usually need 50 percent, or at least a plurality, to win. Now, Bush didn't get that in the last election, so he may be able to steal it again, who knows. In politics, a month is forever, so obviously these things will change, but in the last three months Bush's position has been eroding significantly.

.....I think there's the empirical evidence that talk radio is dominated by conservatives, so you could draw the conclusion that liberals can't do it. But I think you can do liberal talk radio, and this is something we should have started doing 10 years ago and we didn't. There have been a few fitful efforts by individuals to do things, that haven't succeeded for one reason or another, but I think you can do it. Liberals have a little bit of a different mindset, in which I think liberals by nature look for information and conservatives look for ammunition. NPR, for example, is just giving information, and NPR's very popular. But conservatives consider it to be liberal because they're not bloviating, they're actually giving information. So I like to think of our progressive network as sort of NPR with more entertainment and fewer reports on Appalachian quilts.

| |