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Most liberals are overjoyed about Al Franken and Howard Dean. After all, both men are finally succeeding where the Democratic Party has failed for years: landing some punches on George W. and his right-wing spear-throwers.
Franken's book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, is the best-selling book in the country -- and it's making conservatives apoplectic. Howard Dean has brought more passion to the Democratic primary than all of his opponents combined. So it's no surprise that liberals are buying Franken's book and driving up Dean's poll numbers. After years of feeling cheated and attacked, liberals are mad as hell and don't want to take it anymore. There is, however, one significant exception: the liberal punditocracy.
It's next to impossible to find a lefty columnist or talking head from inside the Beltway who's said nice things about the two Democratic firebrands. Instead, they fret that Dean has a "temper." (The New Republic recently ran a cover of Dean which made him look like Hitler circa 1939 -- all it lacked was for someone to pencil in a little mustache on his upper lip.)
The pundits snort that Franken is resorting to the same tactics nasty conservatives use. As Howard Kurtz put it in his Washington Post Web column, "Franken is trying to do for the left what Ann Coulter and Bernard Goldberg... have done for the right: Demonize the other side."
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