The health care reform bill took a non-Joe-Lieberman-heated twist yesterday when Democratic Sen. Al Franken accused Republican John Thune of being highly selective, distorting facts and leaving some others out in how he characterized the bill. Here’s the exchange:
Bill O’Reilly nemesis Franken was both loved and hated as one of Air America’s original talk show hosts. It’s likely the same pattern will follow in his Senate career. One of Franken’s themes on his defunct show (which at times sounded more like a PBS program veering heavily to the left than the Limbaugh-clone-on-the-left that most progressive talk shows do, since most progressive talk essentially used the conservative talk radio model and became the “anti-Rush” in terms of both content and style) was that Democrats didn’t confront Republicans enough and battle them on specifics. He also would talk about distortions or omissions of facts. So his comment here is not surprising, given his ongoing themes in his old talk show.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.