Al Franken, Jonah Goldberg and Rich Lowry on Pundits Fighting

In a post pre-dating this blog by 3 years, Conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg contemplates "Pundits Fighting". When the APF blog relates American politics and punditry to pro-wrestling, it deals with the parallels in the theatrical presentation, archetypes, charisma and psychology. It was not intended to be about real life fisticuffs as Jonah contemplates.

Fight Al Franken? I Guess Not...
As many of you have probably heard, Al Franken, the comedian liberals take seriously, challenged my friend and paycheck provider Rich Lowry to a fist fight this week... Franken was responding to Rich's argument that the Left is on a campaign against manliness. As one might expect, Franken thought he was making a brilliant and funny point about conservative hypocrisy...

Jonah Goldberg considers how he matches up with Franken and how Conservative fare against liberals as a whole

Anyway, at first, I thought I might pick up the gauntlet Rich decided to ignore. There are only a couple of problems. First, while not too long ago I think I could have opened a huge can of whup-ass on Franken, these days I'm so out of shape I have the upper body strength of a twelve-year-old girl — albeit a pretty tough one.

But this whole episode has initiated a vast amount of beer talk among my friends. In short, we keep trying to figure out which conservative pundit-types could beat up which liberal pundit-types in a fight. So far, I hate to say, the conservatives don't look as good as I would have thought.

Jonah Goldberg sanctions some hypothetical Pundit matches. Interestingly there are only a few that have become official Pundit Fighters in the APF:

Tucker Carlson and Matt Labash of the Weekly Standard would certainly be good picks but, I'll tell ya, the list for a good conservative goon squad dries up pretty quickly... I know most of my readers don't like Joe Conason, but you'd bet on him if he were in a gladiator ring up against Ramesh Ponnuru or Michael Medved... who would win in a fight: Bill O'Reilly or Geraldo?

View the existing Fighting Pundit roster.

As Jonah Goldberg reminds, there is a further case to make Al Franken the poster child for the American Pundit Fighting. As previously stated, Franken is unique in that he is a wrestler, Saturday Night Live alum and pundit. Possibly a future senator and arguably the first to challenge other Pundits to a fight.

More on Rich Lowry VS Al Franken
- Spinsanity debate: Al Franken vs. Rich Lowry
- The Battle of the Books: Lowry vs. Franken
- Fisking Franken, Rich Lowry setting the record straight
- Read another Pundit, Pete Dominick challenging Bill O'Reilly to a fight