Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [85]
By the time I got to the dinner, my platelets had done their job, and I was looking quite dapper. I sat between the Irish ambassador, who had a delightful Irish brogue, and Jodie Allen, a managing editor of U.S. News, who is brilliant and charming and really beautiful. But as happy as I was between Jodie and Pat (Mike?), I was taking a good look around. At the table in front of us was Commerce Secretary Don Evans, one of the President’s closest friends. At the table to our right was Richard Perle, the neo-con war profiteer who had recently resigned as chairman of the Defense Policy Board because of a financial conflict of interest, but had remained on the Board itself for reasons that will puzzle ethicists for centuries.
At a table to our left, the jackpot. Karl Rove. Karl Rove! And as the Marine band played “Hail to the Chief,” we both stood, not two feet apart, both applauding the President as he entered the room and took his place on the dais. Rove took note and called out to a White House pal, grinning, “Hey, look, Franken’s applauding the President!”
“Of course I am,” I said, as I continued applauding heartily. “He’s the President of the United States. He’s my president; he’s your president; he’s the President, elected fair and squ—Well, he’s the President.”
“He was elected fair and square,” Rove said, as we both kept applauding.
“I don’t think so.”
“Do you believe in the Constitution?” Rove asked me.
“Yes. I believe in the Constitution,” I said with a firm nod.
“Then he was elected fair and square,” he said.
“That doesn’t necessarily follow,” I answered. “I believe in the Constitution. But he wasn’t elected fair and square.”
That was fun. Then three thousand people, including me, drank a toast to the President, and sat down, and I learned a little about Ireland from Liam (Seamus?). Nothing interesting enough to tell you. I peeked at the program, which had a seating chart, and found Alan Colmes’s table among all the Fox people. I had been watching a lot of Hannity and Colmes during the war in Iraq and had something I thought Alan could use against Hannity.
So, after my salad, I mosied over to table 251. As you can imagine, Don Evans, Richard Perle, and Karl Rove were at very nice tables dead center in front of the stage. Which meant I was sitting pretty, too. For some reason, Fox had lousy seats, as far to one side of the ballroom as possible. And when I reached the Fox tables, I saw that Alan was sitting directly behind a pillar. He had an obstructed view. I looked around the ballroom and saw that, in the entire place, there were four obstructed views. Alan Colmes had one of them.
Seated next to Alan was his fiancée, who is absolutely lovely. Alan introduced us, and I told him he’s a very lucky man. Then I said, “Alan, I’ve been watching your show a lot during this war, and I think I have something that might help you.”
“Oh, really? What?”
“Every day, Hannity goes after Democrats if they make even the mildest criticism of Bush. He says they’re ‘undermining the commander in chief while our men and women are in harm’s way.’ ”
“Yeah,” Alan nodded.
“Well, I did a Nexis on your show during Kosovo. And every day during Kosovo, Hannity was saying things a hundred times worse about Clinton than any Democrat has said about Bush. He said, ‘Clinton can