Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [68]
So I’m doing my usual great job (Note: there is no reason ever to believe a comedian’s self-report on how he went over—nevertheless, I was killing), and I go into a bit about John McCain.
A short sidebar about me and John McCain. I met John in 1996 when he gave a beautiful eulogy at the funeral of a mutual friend, David Ifshin, who died of cancer. Ifshin had been a Vietnam antiwar protester and, in 1970, went to North Vietnam (sans Jane Fonda), where he denounced our involvement in the war on Radio Hanoi. David’s denunciation was piped into the Hanoi Hilton, where McCain got to hear it in his tiny solitary cell.
Cut to: 1988. Ifshin has become a mainstream Democrat and is serving as counsel on the Mondale campaign. McCain, now a congressman from Arizona, angrily denounces Mondale for having Ifshin on his staff. Ifshin goes up to the Hill, marches into McCain’s office, finds him, and says, “I owe you an apology.”
But McCain says, “No. I owe you an apology. You had every right to do what you did.” So they shake hands, become fast friends, and together (with others) work successfully toward normalization of relations between Vietnam and the United States.
In his eulogy, John said that Ifshin had taught him to see the best in everyone.
So I like John McCain.
Anyway, I’m doing the White House Photographers Dinner, and I go into my little McCain riff. “Hey, I like John McCain. And I really think he’s courageous. I mean, his stance on campaign finance reform and tobacco. Wow. That takes guts. But this whole ‘war hero’ thing—I don’t get it. I mean, as far as I’m concerned, he sat out the war. I mean, anyone can get captured! Am I wrong, but isn’t the idea to capture the other guy?”
Big laughs. It’s called irony, and whatever TV, radio, and print correspondents may say, photographers love irony.
The next day, in the Washington Times, I read a column by John McCaslin. And he gives me the “Boo of the Week.”
After several mocking references to Jews, Christians, and Christian doctrine, Mr. Franken scoffed at the war-hero credentials of John McCain, who was shot down over North Vietnam, tortured and held in mostly solitary confinement at the notorious hellhole called the Hanoi Hilton for more than five years.
“Anybody could get captured,” Mr. Franken said, and waited in vain for laughs. But he kept trying: “Essentially, he sat out the war.” A few scattered boos. “Well, isn’t the idea to capture the other guys?”
I call McCaslin and get him on the phone. “That bit killed! Were you even in the same room?” I ask indignantly.
“Uh, no,” he says. Actually, he hadn’t been at the event.
“What?! Then how could you write that?”
“I didn’t.” It turned out McCaslin hadn’t even been aware that the “Boo of the Week” had been in his column. “Wes Pruden probably added it.”
“Who?” (At this point in my life, I wasn’t as up on my right-wing media.)
“He’s the editor. I’m pretty sure he was at the dinner last night.”
“So the editor can add stuff to your column? Without your knowing it?”
“Yeah,” McCaslin said with just a twinge of resignation. “It happens all the time.”
I’d never heard of such a thing. This editor had deliberately put my routine through the “de-irony-izer” to make me, a Democrat, look unpatriotic, and thereby serve his own sick political agenda. And he put it under a columnist’s byline without even consulting him. I had no idea what to do with this. A letter to the editor seemed kind of futile.
So I sit on it. Waiting for just the right time to lay open this scandalous breach of journalistic ethics.
And two years later, I get my opportunity. I’m asked to be the keynote speaker at the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Maybe, I think, I can get the Washington Times expelled from the association.
But I realize I was relying on just one source: McCaslin. To be fair, I at least had to check with the editor for his