RUSH LIMBAUGH IS A BIG FAT IDIOT

Five-time Emmy Award winner Franken (formerly of Saturday Night Live) becomes a political pundit with a vengeance—a vengeance directed against Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich, and others of similar stripe, as well as fat old Rush.

If he continues in this vein, Franken may emerge as the funniest public affairs analyst since Walter Lippmann, and he's a tad less scatological than the Hon. Howard Stern. As one may surmise from the title, ad hominem is his modus operandi, and he attacks with a wonderful lack of civility. To be sure, it's the nutcakes on the political right, the religious bigots, and the paranoid paramilitary that he disses, and he does it with two murderous weapons: satire and facts. Franken's sarcasm is an assault weapon fired at the Goodyear blimp (not to be confused with the title character): "If you ask me, the man who has the easiest job in America is Rush Limbaugh's fact checker.'' Colin Powell, Arlen Specter, and Ross Perot, along with Newt, Phil Gramm, and the rest of the men on white horses are treated to the comic's scorn. (He traces Gingrich's theory of sedentary woman versus giraffe- hunting man to its ostensible source in a 1955 Reader's Digest.) To be fair, he also discusses Mr. Clinton, the "greatest president of the twentieth century'' [sic] and reveals the scoop on a Renaissance Weekend with the prexy.

From an admitted wiseass liberal, and surely not to the taste of the current political majority, this is the kind of one-sided discourse we need more of. Complete with a preemptive New York Times book review and an index that is absolutely independent of the text (ranging from "Ailes, Roger, fat like Limbaugh,'' through "outhouse, Limbaugh as big as,'' to "zeppelin, Limbaugh, size of'').