On the radio.

For some reason, driving from Cleveland to Ithaca today, I felt like listening to talk radio, and I just kept switching back and forth between America Right and Air America -- occasionally mixing in The Power.

America Right was, understandably, fixated on the Newsweek story, but there was very little about it on Air America. Disturbingly, the only attempt at humor I heard from Al Franken in the hour or so I spent with him today was a joke that Donald Rumsfeld had ordered that a Bible and a Talmud be flushed down the toilet, along with an Encyclopedia Britannica "for the reality-based" people.

Franken's show was nearly humor free -- entirely humor free if you don't count bad jokes. It was grim indeed. Some of the things he said were truly awful. Within the space of perhaps half an hour, he said that George Bush could have prevented the 9/11 attacks if he had "paid attention" -- it's in the 9/11 report! -- and that Iraq would be better off if Saddam were still in power -- not merely that on balance, the improvement of having him out is not worth the cost, but that the Iraqis were better off with Saddam.

Painful. Just painful.