Al Franken is not a man; anti-Protestantism; Intelligent Design believer?

Interrogatories for Al Franken are here. Unfortunately, it's just a newspaper Q&A.

However, it does contain this: "I did go to temple, [but] I was confirmed, not bar mitzvahed." I know what "Confirmation" means in Catholicism, but I don't know what it means in this context. Since he hasn't been bar mitzvahed, doesn't that mean that Al Franken is not yet a man?

And, this:

[My dad] was like our Founding Fathers – he was a deist, he believed there was God in nature. We'd talk about it if we were fishing or something, if we were sitting alone. Dad would say the world's too beautiful not to have something behind it.

*cough* Intelligent Design *cough*

And, this little slice of anti-Protestantism:

QUESTION: You wound up going to the Blake School in Minneapolis, known as an elite Protestant high school.

ANSWER: The school started as a school for Protestant boys at the turn of the 20th century. They started letting in Jews in the 1950s to keep the SAT scores up.

I've said that before in public as a joke. And then in 2001, Blake had its centennial. They assigned the history teacher to do a history of the school. She calls me up and says, "You know that joke you do? It's truer than you can possibly imagine."

She had gotten notes from board meetings, and in the '50s, Ivy League schools were turning into meritocracies. Blake was discovering that it was getting harder to get its graduates into Ivy League schools because they were kind of dumb – they were just from these old families. They said, "In order to keep our reputation as one of the top country day schools, we've got to get kids who can get into these Ivy League schools. How are we going to do that?" And somebody went, "Jews!"

...ANSWER: What I'm getting at is the strategy worked. (Laughs.) Nevertheless, we did have chapel where we sang Protestant hymns.

In other news, Stuart is still moving back to Minneapolis and still considering a Senate run. In case he gets elected, he admits he'll have to "sacrifice" his "comic edge" to "some degree". All together now: what else have you been doing for the past few decades?

Around about now, you're probably looking at these questions and wondering whether Franken and the interviewer know each other or are even related. That remains to be seen. However, the same questioner offered this interview from Boston Magazine in 2003.

In the current junior badminton practice, Mr. Smalley gets in some swipes against Bill O'Reilly and our own Beloved Leader, and makes this highly misleading claim:

Since we started, we've at least doubled our audience. I have about 1.25 million listeners on an average week on radio, and then streaming [via the Internet], another 100,000 or so. I think that means something.

[The conservative talk show hosts] have a huge, 17- or 18-year jump on us. But Limbaugh, who's on at the same time as me, has gone down. And that's good.

Rush has indeed gone down. However, he's still trouncing Air America.

And, of course, amid all this discussion of morals, Al Franken is not asked to explain his role in the Air America scandal. I guess we'll have to wait for the Senate campaign.

Posted in StuartSmalley at October 29, 2005 10:07 AM

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Comments

There is a great Al Franken cartoon here:
PUNCH
Check it out.... Your going to love it !

Posted by: Punch at October 30, 2005 12:37 PM