Questions for Al Franken Since he is giving advice on how to question Brett KavanaughBy Kyle Smith
1)Al, as you were posting on social media a list of proposed questions for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, did it occur to you that your opinion on the matter is no more relevant than Harvey Weinstein’s?
2) Al, is it appropriate for a disgraced former U.S. senator to use the Twitter cognomen “U.S. Senator Al Franken”? Are you aware that being a senator is simply a temporary public-service job, not a permanent title of nobility, the usage of which this country discourages?
3) Al, until the abrupt end of your political career, when your term in the U.S. Senate ended as badly as the release of your film Stuart Saves His Family, you had been a U.S. senator for eight and a half years. Yet you had been a carcinogenically unfunny comedian for more than 40 years. Would not the Twitter handle “Carcinogenically Unfunny Comedian” be more appropriate for you to use as a permanent title?
4) Al, should not a senator who disgraced his office by sexually assaulting various women adopt a public pose of contrition rather than arrogance in the months immediately following his resignation?
5) Al, when you publicly list the questions you’d like to ask Kavanaugh, do you think Minnesota’s new junior senator, Tina Smith, might have just cause to feel that you are infringing on her territory? Are you in effect mansplaining to Senator Smith how to go about questioning a Supreme Court nominee?
6) Al, in your strange resignation speech of December 7, when you said, “Some of the allegations against me are simply not true. Others I remember very differently,” were you implying that you were resigning despite having done nothing wrong?
7) If the answer to No. 6 is no, why did you fail to express contrition for your many disgusting acts in that speech?
8) When you said, during that resignation speech, “I know in my heart that nothing I have done as a senator, nothing has brought dishonor on this institution,” were you saying that your heart was a more trustworthy witness to the truth than the eight women who accused you of sexual assault?
9) If the answer to No. 8 is yes, how do you reconcile that with your boast, in that same speech, that you are a “champion of women”?
10) When you called yourself a “champion of women,” did you mean you possessed championship-level abilities to grab unsuspecting women’s breasts and buttocks and force your tongue down their throats?
11) Wouldn’t such a person be more accurately described as a “champion sexual assaulter”?
12) When you failed to acknowledge, during that resignation speech, that any of the sexual-assault allegations against you were true but instead asserted, “Some of the allegations against me are simply not true. Others I remember very differently,” were you not in effect saying your accusers were lying or crazy?
13) If the answer to No. 14 is yes, would it not have been more to the point to simply have said, “The bitches set me up”?
14) If one or more of the women who accused you of sexual assault is telling the truth, would you like to take this opportunity to confess to this criminal act?
15) Have you apologized personally to any of the women you sexually assaulted? If so, which ones?
Have you apologized personally to any of the women you sexually assaulted? If so, which ones?
16) When you spent a portion of your resignation speech alluding to alleged sexual assaults committed by others, were you trying to convey the message that because other men were also guilty of sexual assault, your acts of sexual assault should be overlooked?
17) Is there any other crime for which you consider a valid defense to be “Others have also been guilty of this, therefore I should not be punished”?
18) Do you understand that your many appearances on Saturday Night Live over the years were taken as a signal by Americans that it was time to get up and go for a wee?
19) Do you understand that your attempted SNL catchphrase “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me” was the worst catchphrase since David Letterman’s “they pelted us with rocks and garbage,” with the caveat that Letterman’s phrase was intentionally clunky?
20) When polls showed you were down roughly ten points during your 2008 Senate race, you came to an agreement with your wife, Franni, that she would cut a TV commercial in which she publicly discussed her alcoholism for the first time. Do you feel any sense of shame whatsoever that you exploited your wife’s suffering in the pursuit of political power?
21) When your wife, in that TV spot, alluded to the two “beautiful” movies you wrote that were inspired by her alcoholism, did it startle even you to realize one of these two allegedly gorgeous films was Stuart Saves His Family?
22) Do you feel at all responsible for the damage you did to America’s mirth industry with all of the staggeringly unfunny sketches you appeared in on Saturday Night Live?
23) Have you in fact secretly spent your adult life in the employ of some foreign power charged with damaging the global competitiveness of American comedy?
24) If the answer to the above is no, how do you explain the many otherwise inexplicable minutes of airtime lent by SNL to your immensely unamusing character Stuart Smalley?
25) When you, as Stuart, crowed, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me,” did it occur to you that no one, in fact, liked Stuart? Or did you not learn that until the movie went on to gross $912,000 in theaters?
26) Isn’t it kind of pathetic for a disgraced former senator to play-act senatorial duties after his resignation?
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