As much as I hate to admit it, Fox News is dead wrong in their dopey lawsuit against Al Franken. First of all, there is (and ought to be) a pretty wide legal berth given to satire. And secondly, all they are doing is adding to Franken's cache with his target audience.

According to Drudge today, the book is now sitting at the top of Amazon.com's sales rankings a month before publication. His sources say that Fox News filed the suit at the urging of Bill O'Reilly. O'Reilly and Franken have been trading barbs since an ugly incident a few months ago at a booksellers convention, where the two wound up shouting at each other (with Franken coming off as an unhinged crybaby) on C-SPAN.

As an aside, can I just say that I find Bill O'Reilly to be a pompous, opportunistic putz? His Howard Beale faux-populism strikes me as hollow and calculated, and one gets the impression that he would change his views tommorrow if he sensed such a thing would buy him greater success. It's ironic that Franken apparently attacks O'Reilly in his "Look at the Right," since O'Reilly isn't on the "right" even by so-called "neocon" standards. He has no identifiable principles--everything appears to be based on off-the-cuff gut reactions.

Fox News' suit won't even make it into court, nor should it. O'Reilly has a nightly pulpit (and a fair amount of book sales to his own credit) which ought to be the proper forum to address Franken if he's feeling defensive. But he oughtn't go running to some judge. It makes him look like a sniveling, thin-skinned whiner.