Actor and satirist Al Franken employed hilarious countenances, voice imitations and amusing anecdotes in his speech, "Al Franken: On Politics and Anything Else That Crosses His Mind At 4:30 P.M," yesterday in Dodds Auditorium.
Woodrow Wilson had a plan, Franken said, "to end all wars." Yet President Bush, the butt of most of Franken's invective, has involved the country in "a war that will never end," Franken said.
In a sarcastic tone, he thanked the Bush administration — and its yet-unsuccessful search for illegal armaments — for "not planting weapons of mass destruction."
Bush objects to gay marriage, Franken said, but the president has overlooked a far more dangerous threat — terrorist marriages.
With all those terrorist couples walking about, Franken said, "I don't know what he's thinking."
Franken poked fun at the president for his alleged lack of dedication when he was in the Air National Guard during the Vietnam War.
Franken imitated Bush as he was asked on "Meet the Press" about his time on a base in Alabama. Unable to recall the names of those he worked with, he called them "the big guy," "the pilot guy," and — after Franken described how people at the base failed to remember Bush — the "bad memory guy."
"Bush is going to be the first president since Herbert Hoover not to create any new" net jobs, Franken said.
The total amount of new jobs created by the current president and his father would be zero, Franken said.
He added that if the Bushes' rate of job creation were extrapolated to the beginning of the nation's history, "Americans would have never . . . worked" and would still be "hunter-gatherers."
Still, Franken countered his humor with serious thoughts on the Iraq war and the situation in Arabic countries. He recently returned from a USO tour of American bases in the Middle East.
"It's chaos, total chaos" in the Middle East, Franken said. Bush "did not assemble a real international coalition," Franken stated. Much of the problems in that conflict-ridden area are due to the hubris of the Bush administration, he said.
Franken is the author of the New York Times bestseller, "Lies And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right."
He was part of the original writing staff that created "Saturday Night Live," on which he played insecure motivational speaker Stuart Smalley.
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