Sure enough: The weekend after finally winning his lawyer-infested Senate brawl, there was Al Franken snuggling and kissing a baby on the front page of Sunday’s Star Tribune. Instead of hanging out with entertainment industry types or vacationing with rich friends, Franken was in hot pursuit of blue collar “atta-boys!” and other warm fuzzies up on the Iron Range over the 4th of July.

In addition to playing “regular Joe,” Franken let us know that he’s preparing for a hum-drum entrance into the Senate. According to the Star Tribune,

in Franken’s first months in the Senate, battles over weighty national issues may take a back seat to the more parochial matters of constituent service.

Advisers such as Drew Littman, who organized [Hillary] Clinton’s Senate office, have counseled Franken to focus on Minnesota issues and the details of policy.

‘It’s tempting in the Senate to see it as a place where you can work on any national issue,’ said Littman, Franken’s new chief of staff. ‘He’s going to dig in on the local stuff.’

So what’s the deal? Is this a new, gentlemanly Al Franken who no longer believes that Republicans should be locked up in re-education camps?

Not at all. This past weekend, we saw Franken’s campaign to “mainstream” himself swing into high gear.

It’s a two-step plan.

In Step One, Franken shoots for news reports that include only vague, general reminders of his pre-Senate life. This is the “forget-the-former-Franken” part of the campaign.

News reports – like the Sunday Star Tribune article – may acknowledge that our new senator was occasionally a “bit too edgy” in the past. But gone is any reminder of Franken’s ugly public disdain for Christians, or any question regarding whether a soft-core pornographic “satirist” is a suitable member of our nation’s most august deliberative body.

Step Two of the campaign is the reinventing of Franken as a serious, “nose to the grindstone” public servant. Say hello to our baby-cuddling, State-Fair-attending, blue-collar-buddy, constituent-service-focused new man in Washington.

Are we going to get this vanilla version of Franken as our senator? Don’t count on it. Once the transition period is over, he’ll have plenty of opportunities for a repeat performance of his class-clown shtick.

Next time, though, his playground won’t be Saturday Night Live. It will be the United States Senate, where he’ll be casting critical votes on America’s health care, the national economy, and the ever-present threats that loom in a very dangerous world.
  

The U.S. Supreme Court stunned the nation today with a 5-4 decision holding that Al Franken — until recently the Obama administration’s ambassador to the Vatican — was the official winner of the 2008 Minnesota Senate contest.

The court held that lower courts had erred by refusing to count three decisive absentee ballots for Franken found two years ago jammed in the filter of a Brooklyn Park woman’s vacuum cleaner. “Every vote must count,” proclaimed Chief Justice Al Gore, who read his 936-page decision from the bench.

The court’s decision closes an epic seven-year struggle filled with legal twists and turns unparalleled in our nation’s history.

Coleman appeared to hold a decided advantage in the contest after he won the actual vote count in 2008. But as the dispute dragged on, the events following Election Day proved largely irrelevant — minor skirmishes leading up to the legal, political and public relations battle that was to follow.

After the seventh recount of the vote was completed in September 2009 — settling nothing since both candidates challenged every vote cast — Franken filed simultaneous legal proceedings in state and federal courts, before the European Commission of Human Rights and with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

In 2010, Coleman suffered a setback when the Supreme Court issued its first decision on the contest. In what became known as the “Franken’s Fools” decision, the court held that even those absentee ballots that voters forgot to mail must be counted.

No forgotten ballots were ever recovered, but Franken’s crack legal team assembled a group of Harvard psychologists who submitted expert testimony at trial establishing that the average Franken voter was twice as likely as the average Coleman voter to be chronically forgetful about life’s basic tasks. Statisticians extrapolated on this disparity to convince the court that Franken had been unfairly deprived of 147 votes.

In 2011, Coleman staged a comeback with his 23 “Every Coleman Vote Counts” booths at the Minnesota State Fair. The venture’s success proved short-lived, however, when a team of U.N. election observers — composed of Zimbabwean and Iranian monitors and led by former President Jimmy Carter — investigated reports that Coleman operatives were offering a pound of cheese curds for each Coleman absentee ballot found.

The Coleman campaign disavowed knowledge of such practices. Ultimately, though, it voluntarily discontinued the effort after it was revealed that Coleman’s absentee vote tally from the State Fair operation exceeded the adult population of Minnesota.

Coleman’s last big push for votes — the Hail Mary effort that produced this morning’s Supreme Court decision — was his “Working Together to Get Things Done” campaign, introduced in April 2013 as an opportunity for supporters to scour their garages for stray Coleman ballots and finish off their spring cleaning at the same time.

Through the cleanup program, Coleman’s vote total eventually pulled even with Franken’s. The decisive moment came when Coleman neighbor Herb (Buck) Anderson claimed to have found the soiled remnants of three absentee ballots near a mouse hole in the back of his garage. Former FBI investigators on retainer to the Coleman campaign were able to reconstruct the ballots and prove through forensic analysis that the markings in the Coleman ovals were lead-based, while the Franken markings were chemically consistent with mouse droppings.

A one-vote Coleman win seemed assured based on the so-called “Buck ballots,” until Anderson’s wife, Alida, stepped forward with the three Franken ballots that had been jammed in her vacuum cleaner filter. It was these ballots that eventually resulted in today’s Supreme Court decision. The Andersons’ divorce was finalized last year.

Reached for comment in Hollywood on the set of the new reality show he’s jointly producing with 89-year-old Playboy founder Hugh Hefner — tentatively titled “The Viagra Monologues ” — Franken explained that his Senate campaign had been satire all along and referred further inquiries to his accountant.

Coleman, who is living temporarily in an ice-fishing shack he rents from a well-heeled GOP contributor, could not be reached.

The Supreme Court’s decision is, of course, largely symbolic, since the 2008 U.S. Senate seat term expired last year.

I get it — Al Franken is a serious senatorial candidate despite his penchant for the pornographic. Franken’s one-liners about rape and oral sex and his leering fantasies about big-busted women were just for yucks, right?

Last June, DFL bigwigs chose to forget about their man’s decades-long record of sexual crudity after he hooked the endorsement by putting on a serious face and saying “sorry” at the party’s convention.

But Franken didn’t apologize for another aspect of his trash-talking shtick. He’s aimed some of his most offensive material at religious believers, particularly Christians.

Why hasn’t this been aired in public? We in the press are too busy searching through Sarah Palin’s junior high yearbooks and tracking down the filing dates of Joe the Plumber’s tax returns.

Meanwhile, Franken gets a pass for making a joke of the life and death of Jesus Christ.

Franken finds Christ’s crucifixion to be a barrel of laughs. For example, in his 1999 book, “Why Not Me?” he wrote about his discovery — as a fictional former president — of “the complete skeleton of Jesus Christ still nailed to the cross” during an archeological dig. At the Franken Presidential Library gift shop, visitors can buy “small pieces of Jesus’ skeleton.”

“We would like to display Jesus’ skeleton at some future point,” Franken went on. “It’s merely a matter of designing and building an exhibition space … . Until then he’s very comfortable in a box down in our basement near the geothermal power station.”

Very funny. Anybody want to try a joke like that about Mohammed?

Franken also wrote a Saturday Night Live monologue for Jesus Christ that appeared in a magazine. After poking fun at Christians’ belief that Jesus was both God and man, he had Christ speculate on having the hots for Mary Magdalene:

“If Mary Magdalene looked like Barbara Hershey, I might have thought twice about this celibacy thing. I mean, the real Mary Magdalene was about four foot two, 135 pounds. And with bad teeth yet.”

In Franken’s world, God has a mouth as foul as Franken’s. In one book, he has God refer to books about liberal media bias as “total bullshit.” Later, he describes God as having his head “up his ass.”

But Franken saves his sharpest barbs for those weirdos, Catholics.

In 2006, he and a guest on his Air America radio show joked about Eucharistic communion wafers — sacred to Catholics as the body of Christ — and compared them to chips and guacamole. In “Dog Confessional,” a proposed sketch for Saturday Night Live, Franken depicted “a series of dogs, played by cast members, confessing to a priest,” according to the Washington Post. NBC refused to air it.

In another book, Franken described greeting a New York audience with the words, “Isn’t Cardinal O’Connor an asshole?”

Franken’s campaign did not return a phone call seeking comment.

If a 12-year-old kid spouted this stuff in a schoolyard, he’d be hauled to the principal’s office and told to grow up. But in today’s surreal political climate, a guy who lobs insults like these has a shot at one the highest political offices in the land.

We’re used to slanderers of Christianity getting government arts grants. But Franken wants more. He’s asking us to send him to what’s been called “the most exclusive club in the world” — and to serve us there until 2014.

Our nation’s founders wanted the Senate — as Congress’ upper house — to balance with a sober, long-term perspective the much more numerous House of Representatives, whose members serve only two-year terms and are supposed to reflect the people’s shifting sentiments. Senators serve six-year terms, and were intended to be the nation’s wisest councilors — equipped to discern and protect the country’s broad, enduring interests.

“The use of the Senate,” explained James Madison in 1787, “is to consist in proceeding with more coolness, with more system, and with more wisdom, than the popular branch.”

For this reason, the Constitution entrusts the Senate with unique powers — its members conduct impeachment trials, make treaties, and give the president advice and consent on important appointments, including Cabinet secretaries, ambassadors and federal judicial nominees with lifetime tenure.

A Minnesota senator represents the whole state, not a smaller, relatively homogeneous congressional district, as House members do.

If Franken is elected, can he represent all the people of Minnesota — including Christians — for whom he has repeatedly shown disdain?

In the last few months, I’ve gotten a flood of emails from readers suggesting stories about Al Franken and his follies. This vein could be a rich one to mine, given Franken’s years of motor-mouthing on Saturday Night Live and Air America Radio, and his collisions with taxing authorities across the country.But I’ve let the Franken stories blow by, overwhelmed by their number. However, things changed last week when Franken’s 2000 Playboy article — “Porn-O-Rama” — got stuck in my e-mail filter.

I know what you’re thinking: Kersten’s got one of those prudish, Jerry Falwell-style family filters designed to snare anything that would raise a slight pink on your grandmother’s cheeks. Not so. Mine seems to screen primarily ads for male enhancement products and overly creative animal films.

Why then did my e-mail filter crash closed on Porn-O-Rama?

In his Playboy romp, Franken fantasized about oral sex delivered by a machine, as well as sex with combinations of females who fit the Playboy view of women as big-breasted automatons, panting at the prospect of servicing the likes of Franken. That’s why they call it fantasy, I guess.

I wonder how many DFL officials will be able to pull Porn-O-Rama through their Internet filters and read it before the party endorses its candidate for U.S. Senate this weekend. I wonder, too, whether folks like Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Attorney General Lori Swanson, whose campaigns took money in 2006 from Franken’s so-called Midwest Values PAC (yes, you read that right) will feel compelled to return those bucks on truth-in-advertising grounds.

Last week, spokesman Andy Barr articulated the Franken campaign’s official defense as follows: “Al understands, and the people of Minnesota understand, the difference between what a satirist does and what a senator does.” Key Democrats like Reps. Betty McCollum, Tim Walz and Keith Ellison already have rejected Camp Franken’s attempt to explain away Al’s excellent adventures in Playboyland. Will others follow?We’ve often heard Franken described as a “satirist.” The label makes him sound respectable, even sophisticated. We associate satire with some of literature’s greatest names. If applicable, the term explains and excuses Franken’s work, placing it squarely in the literary mainstream.

Does Franken qualify as a satirist?

To find out, I pored over dictionaries and literary compendia. Webster’s online dictionary was typical. It defined satire as “trenchant wit, irony or sarcasm used to expose and discredit vice or folly.”

In other words, satire is serious business. A satirist mocks a problematic situation in order to bring it to public attention, correct or reform it. He blends comedy and censure in the service of mankind’s improvement.

Take Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” perhaps the most famous satire in the English language. In this work, Swift, an eighteenth century Irishman, suggested that poverty-stricken Irish families could survive by selling their numerous children to wealthy landlords to eat. Swift’s grim humor is a vehicle for what he called his “savage indignation” at England’s grievous injustice regarding the Irish.

The Greek dramatist Aristophanes used a lighter touch in his classic satire, “Lysistrata.” In this ribald play, the women of Sparta and Athens withhold sex from their husbands for a larger purpose: to bring an end to the Peloponnesian War.

Porn-O-Rama is no satire. Franken doesn’t condemn Hugh Hefner’s pornographic world — he embraces it. The piece is a celebration of the Playboy philosophy, laced with effusions about the glories of Internet porn.

Today, parents and teachers are struggling to prevent such smut from overwhelming our culture. Ellison reacted to Franken’s lewd Porn-O-Rama joke about his sixth-grade son’s supposed report on bestiality by saying, “I have to ask myself, can I explain it to my 11-year-old daughter? I’d have considerable difficulty.”

How about Barr’s second point — that Minnesotans will “understand” that Franken’s conduct as a “satirist” is irrelevant to his potential conduct as a senator?While a man’s sense of humor is only one part of his personality, it tells us something essential about him — it bears the DNA of his character, you might say. That’s why you would be surprised to learn, for example, that a friend you believed to be a devoted father and husband — respectful of his wife and a model for his children — was guffawing publicly about his fantasies of sex with other women.

We understand instinctively that the lives of real human beings cannot be separated into compartments.

I want to know more about this half-wit accountant, Allen Chanzis, who keeps getting blamed for Al Franken’s failures to pay every tax known to man. After all, Franken’s no two-bit bar comedian who can claim he’s never made a dime to offset his bar tab.

Even before his current attempt to get to Washington to enact tax laws that apply to the rest of us, Franken was in the Cadillac club of high-end comedians. One would assume he has a stable of accountants and lawyers housed in his servants’ quarters.

At least Keith Ellison could claim that his serial campaign finance violations involved obscure laws that bite you only when in elective office. But Franken’s failure to pay income taxes in 17 states, failure to pay workers compensation premiums, failure to pay disability premiums and failure to file corporate tax returns pretty much takes the wind out of the “gosh, I forgot” argument.

At least, that’s what I first thought. But then our chief law enforcer—Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman – announced that he has no problem with this kind of serial law-breaking. In a Saturday interview, Freeman morphed into a big softy:

‘It appears to me that this is some carelessness in his personal business,’ Freeman said of Franken. ‘Nothing criminal, nothing malicious, nothing nasty. I’m guessing most people have something [similar] in their life, where they forgot to pay their property taxes or workers’ comp.’

Fair enough, but I want the same consideration for Think Again miscreants when they skirt the edge of what is legal. When Downtown Dan “forgets” to put money in the parking meter, JonR “forgets” his driver’s license at home, Tiny Litess “forgets” the speed limit is 30 mph in town, and Average Guy “forgets” that he’s supposed to pay for the overpriced gas at the pump, I demand equal treatment from County Attorney Freeman.

And after Freeman clears these four upstanding gentlemen because they exhibited “carelessness in … personal business,” I expect that each will have a shot at a run for the Senate so that they can create laws for the rest of us shmucks. Yes, I know; they may also need qualifications for such high aspirations, such as a career as a high-end comedian.

Does Franken still have a pulse in his political life? I’ve stopped trying to guess. Stand-up comics enabled by half-wit accountants weave wonders in this world