Murdoch Press Blows Gasket Over Franken Victory

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Here’s a fun dose of schadenfreude.

Sen.-elect Al Franken’s (D-MN) long-awaited victory in the 2008 Minnesota Senate race seems to have caused quite a lot of stress in the Murdoch-owned press. Remember, this is the same corporation that sued him for his Lies And The Lying Liars Who Tell Them book back in 2003, with the unintended consequence of giving him tons of free publicity to sell books — and elevating him into being a hero of liberal activists, without which he might never have become a politician!

On Fox News yesterday evening, Glenn Beck was quite alarmed by the development:

“This is like having me in the Senate,” Beck said. “You don’t want me as a Senator! What is that? I mean, it shows how crazy our country has gone — you don’t want me as a Senator, you don’t want Al Franken as a Senator.”

Regardless of whether you agree with that comparison, you do have to admire Beck’s honesty about himself.

Fox host Brian Kilmeade was also very upset this morning:

“Now we find out that Al Franken — who’s barely sane if you read his books, and is quite angry in every facet of his life — is now the Senator from Minnesota,” Kilmeade said, turning to his Minnesota-born co-host Gretchen Carlson. “Explain yourself, Gretchen.”

The Wall Street Journal also has an editorial decrying the election process in Minnesota — an essay that is so full of factual errors and distortions about what happened, it can drive you nuts if you’d spent countless hours following all the gritty details like I did. Its major fallacy is to accuse the Franken campaign of committing supposedly dirty maneuvers, without mentioning that the Coleman side was participating in the exact same activities just as fervently or even more so.

“Mr. Franken now goes to the Senate having effectively stolen an election,” the Journal concludes. “If the GOP hopes to avoid repeats, it should learn from Minnesota that modern elections don’t end when voters cast their ballots. They only end after the lawyers count them.”

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