Al Franken: The World's Most Famous Liberal Author

Speaks to Salon from the airport:

[Puts the phone in the tray and it goes through the X-ray machine. It is quiet in there, with occasional sounds of fumbling. Clatter as Franken picks up the phone again.]

OK, so we were talking about why you get under the skin of ...

Well, they don't like it because I'm a liberal who's not afraid to take them on, and to take them on, on their own terms. I'm fascinated with their methods, and therefore I call them on it, and they don't like that.

These guys are notorious — they can dish it out but that can't take it.

There are not a lot of people like you doing this right now. Why do you think that is?

Because there is an aspect to it that's sort of ugly. You have to be willing to get the day-by-day dish from NewsMax.com, you have to be willing to see things like the complaint they ran against me. Those kind of techniques. Which I don't use. I won't sink to that level, but what's great about it is when you expose them, it's jujitsu. You just use what they do against them. And when you do that, they get mad. They go, "How dare you read what I said on Nexis!" O'Reilly keeps saying I'm a smear artist, but all I do is just say what they said. They think somehow it's unfair that they're held accountable for what they said, I guess. I don't know. They're awful people. I'm not talking about conservatives, I'm talking about people who do this kind of distortion. There are a lot of conservatives I like, but they don't indulge in what the guys I write about do....

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