Comedian Al Franken, who is looking to unseat incumbent senator Norm Coleman (R-MN), has a problem with porn. Not ribald humor created by someone else that he downloaded to his computer in the privacy of his home, but material he created for public consumption.

A former “Saturday Night Live” cast member, Franken wrote a 1,478-word article titled “Porn-O-Rama!”  for the Y2K issue Playboy. Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson gives a pithy summary: 

[H]e enthuses that it is an "exciting time for pornographers and for us, the consumers of pornography." The Internet, he explains, is a "terrific learning tool. For example, a couple of years ago, when he was 12, my son used the Internet for a sixth-grade report on bestiality. Joe was able to download some effective visual aids, which the other students in his class just loved." Franken goes on to relate a soft-core fantasy about women providing him with sex who were trained at the "Minnesota Institute of Titology."

[Note: The article is not easily obtainable online, but you can read huge chunks of it for yourself here (warning: do not click on this link if you are easily offended). Franken’s fantasy of “virtual reality” sex acts and carnal relations with robots (“Sexbots”) is every 13-year old nerdy boy’s ultimate wet dream, which says a lot about his maturity and fitness for office.]

Gerson wonders whether Coleman should make a campaign issue out of Franken’s puerile fixation with technosex, and with good reason: “Remember that when Ken Starr detailed Bill Clinton’s most repulsive antics - stained dresses and such - it was Starr who was accused of sexual obssessiveness.”

For his part, Franken says his material is “provocative, touching and funny” and both he and his defenders call him a “political satirist.” Gerson’s column offers additional examples of what passes for satire amongst libs:

He once proposed a television sketch about a female CBS reporter being drugged and raped [Note: This is a reference to a 1995 skit for SNL that never aired in which Andy Rooney is the rapist and Lesley Stahl is the victim.] He has suggested that his next book title might be "I F -- -- -- Hate Those Right-Wing Motherf -- -- -- !" At an event hosted by the Feminist Majority Foundation in 1999, Franken offered this thigh-slapper: "Why don't we focus on what Afghan women can do? They can cook, bear children and pray. As I recall, that was fine for our grandmothers." …

The objects of Franken's humor - including political opponents and women - are not merely mocked but dehumanized. His trashiness is also nastiness. Rather than lampooning the emptiness and viciousness of our political discourse - a proper role for satire - Franken has powerfully reinforced those failures.

Well dehumanizing “humor” is exactly what you would expect from a man whose utopian ideal is a world in which all emotional intimacy is stripped from lovemaking, reducing sex to  mechanics (literally). The Orgasmatron in “Sleeper” is funny, “Porn-O-Rama!” ain’t.

If you don’t want to take The Stiletto’s word for it, here’s a column by Tom Hauser for Politics In Minnesota:

While Porn-O-Rama! is sexist, crass and vulgar, the one thing it is not is funny. Which raises the most important question of all: What kind of judgment does a man have who makes jokes about bestiality and 12-year-olds in the same sentence?

A man who, at the age of 49 in 2000, writes, "The moment Playboy told me I could tackle any subject for its millennium issue, I immediately chose pornography" ...?

And Steven Schier, a political science professor at Minnesota’s Carleton College tells Politico’s Josh Kraushaar: “The thing I don’t understand about Al Franken is how he thought those jokes were funny. The biggest failing of any comedian is failing to be funny.”

So Franken’s supporters defend his soft-core porn fantasy as being funny, while Judge Alex Kozinski’s joke collection is slammed as being pornographic. Guess some people just don’t know funny when they see it.

Michelle’s Media Makeover

The MSM is at a loss to understand why Michelle Obama got tagged as an “angry black woman,” and is bending over backwards to disabuse working class men and woman - in particular - of this notion. Case in point, this fawning profile in The New York Times, which was unintentionally revealing in ways that support the lingering concerns some voters have about her takeaway message from 20 years of listening to Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s sermons.  

Here’s Michelle Obama in action as VP of Community Affairs at the University of Chicago Medical Center in 2001:  

Hospital brass had gathered to break ground for a children’s building when African-American protesters broke in with bullhorns, drowning out the proceedings with demands that the hospital award more contracts to minority firms. …

She revised the contracting system, sending so much business to firms owned by women and other minorities that the hospital won awards.

But were these firms the most experienced in hospital construction? Were their bids the most competitive? The Times doesn’t say, leading the reader to wonder whether factors such as these entered into the contract-awarding process at all.

A “Community Affairs” executive is typically part spokesperson for his or her employer and part ombudsman. Michelle Obama expanded her role and “altered the hospital’s research agenda,” according to The Times:

When the human papillomavirus vaccine, which can prevent cervical cancer, became available, researchers proposed approaching local school principals about enlisting black teenage girls as research subjects.

Mrs. Obama stopped that. The prospect of white doctors performing a trial with black teenage girls summoned the specter of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment of the mid-20th century, when white doctors let hundreds of black men go untreated to study the disease [emphasis, The Stiletto].

Anyone who knows the facts about the Tuskegee experiment understands that (a) the government did not infect black men with syphilis, as Rev. Wright so often charged; (b) the men under observation had gotten the STD the typical way and were in the tertiary-stage, thus were no longer contagious; (c) one of the reasons the men weren’t treated was that no proven remedies were then available; and (d) the experiment was carried out “with the full knowledge, endorsement and participation of African-American medical professionals, hospitals and research institutes,” according to University of Chicago professor Richard Schweder.

The Times elides Michelle Obama’s motivation for putting the kibosh on the vaccine trial by informing readers that the participants in the Tuskegee experiment were untreated, but not stating whether she believed they had been deliberately infected. Reading between the lines, one can surmise that Michelle Obama halted a medical trial aimed at slowing the spread of a potentially fatal STD amongst the black population – exactly what the Tuskegee experiment was trying to accomplish – because she did not understand the facts as her colleague Schweder does, but as her now-ex-pastor Wright does.

But wait, there’s more:

“I hate diversity workshops,” she says. “Real change comes from having enough comfort to be really honest and say something very uncomfortable.” …

Mrs. Obama has already had to check her brutally honest approach to talking about race. Now she co-stars in a campaign that would as soon mute most discussion of race.

Michelle Obama can’t possibly hate diversity workshops more than white Americans who are continually on the receiving end of a “brutally honest” approach where only one side is allowed to be brutal and there isn’t all that much honesty about just what – if anything - whites today “owe” blacks for slavery and Jim Crow, injustices that occurred two or more generations before they were born or their ancestors even got here.