{"id":10254,"date":"2015-07-21T13:55:06","date_gmt":"2015-07-21T13:55:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=10254"},"modified":"2015-07-21T13:55:06","modified_gmt":"2015-07-21T13:55:06","slug":"sen-frankens-joke-gets-a-fresh-look","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=10254","title":{"rendered":"Sen. Franken’s ‘joke’ gets a fresh look"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Fifteen years ago, before he was a United States senator, Al Franken was a comedian.<\/p>\n

And a pretty funny one at that.<\/p>\n

He also hosted a radio talk show on the progressive Air America network.<\/p>\n

In 2000, he wrote an essay in which he said this about Sen. John McCain: \u201cI have tremendous respect for McCain but I don\u2019t buy the war hero thing.\u00a0Anybody can be captured. I thought the idea was to capture them. As far as I\u2019m concerned he sat out the war.\u201d<\/p>\n

The\u00a0statement is getting some added attention these days in light of what Republican presidential candidate\u00a0Donald Trump said of his fellow Republican’s service record.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.politico.com\/story\/2015\/07\/al-franken-criticize-jon-mccain-captured-donald-trump-120359.html?cmpid=sf#ixzz3gS3qJiW9<\/p>\n

Franken was elected to the Senate in 2008 in a razor-thin margin. He has become a leading progressive Democrat in that body. According to his spokesman, he made the statement about McCain as a joke. He told McCain that very thing when McCain was a guest on Franken’s Air America radio show.<\/p>\n

Well, whatever Franken’s motives were in his pre-Senate days, I don’t find a single thing funny about what John McCain endured for five-plus years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam.<\/p>\n

Yes, he’s saluted his Senate colleague since then. I’m sure the tributes have been sincere.<\/p>\n

But here’s an example of how one’s words never disappear.<\/p>\n\n

Tweet<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fifteen years ago, before he was a United States senator, Al Franken was a comedian. And a pretty funny one at that. He also hosted a radio talk show on the progressive Air America network. In 2000, he wrote an essay in which he said this about Sen. John McCain: \u201cI have tremendous respect for … Continue reading Sen. Franken’s ‘joke’ gets a fresh look<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,14],"tags":[185,216,1424,2546,3338,3742,4980,5116],"class_list":["post-10254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-national-news","category-political-news","tag-air-america","tag-al-franken","tag-donald-trump","tag-john-mccain","tag-north-vietnam","tag-prisoner-of-war","tag-u-s-senate","tag-vietnam-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10254"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10254\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}