Al Franken may be an increasingly cranky liberal, but he has our congratulations for tackling a supporter of Lyndon LaRouche who was heckling Howard Dean at a New Hampshire campaign event this week. Mr. LaRouche, age 81, won 88 votes of about 200,000 cast Tuesday in New Hampshire’s Democratic primary. He was released in 1994 after serving five years in federal prison for mail and tax fraud.

Yet as often as not lately, it has seemed that liberals were more eager to follow Mr. LaRouche than tackle him, as Robert L. Bartley pointed out in one of his last columns, issued on June 9, 2003, under the headline “Joining LaRouche in the Fever Swamps.” It noted that mainstream publications like The New Yorker and the New York Times were making common cause with Mr. LaRouche in blaming the Iraq war on the machinations of a “Straussian” or “neo-conservative” cabal. So it’s good to see a prominent liberal like Mr. Franken tackle the LaRouche campaign the same way Bartley did.

Mr. LaRouche’s fraud and his trafficking in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are bad enough, but his campaign has the additional trait of seeking attention by disrupting the campaign events of others with loud heckling. By tackling the heckler, Mr. Franken made the point that such campaign tactics are unacceptable. We would like to think that Mr. Franken would do the same even if the speaker being disrupted weren’t Dr. Dean but someone like, say, Leo Strauss.