SALON: Upon learning that Franken had prevailed in a unanimous decision by his home state’s highest court, the usual suspects on Fox News Channel and in the Limbaugh wasteland of radio immediately threw up a barrage of furious invective.

Wasting no time on gracious concessions, they concentrated on two themes. First: Franken himself is wild, spiteful, menacing, bigoted and, most of all, deranged (as must be anyone who voted for him). Second: Franken’s ascension to the Senate is tainted by the process, which his opponent insisted on prolonging.

Sadly, the most notorious Franken antagonist, Bill ‘Osama Bin’ O’Reilly, was absent from the airwaves on the evening of Franken’s victory. Demure guest host Monica Crowley seemed bemused by the Minnesota outcome. But Glenn Beck, in his semiliterate way, heaped on enough abuse to keep Billo’s fans satisfied for the moment. “It shows how crazy our country has gone,” he began. “It shows that we’ve lost our minds. It’s like we’ve slipped through a wormhole. It’s like, this look likes the country I grew up in, but no — Al Franken would never be a senator … We have entered a place to where there isn’t statesmanship anymore.” [ READ MORE ]

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Special Read – Newsweek’s Harold Fineman on Al Franken: The Mind of Al Franken — Minnesota’s new senator is no clown.

Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma called Al “the clown from Minnesota.” That statement, in and of itself, is amusing–since it comes from a man who has declared global warming “to be the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people“; who has demanded, admittedly with no justification, a criminal investigation of the Environmental Protection Agency; who has suggested that Sonia Sotomayor is a slave to “her own race and gender“; and who announced that he would vote against her on the day she was nominated, hearings be damned.

Now that is a clown.

Al Franken is not one. [ READ MORE ]

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