Sunday, November 13, 2005
The Spinmeisters Are At It Again
I love the Strib, but every so often I'm reminded that D.J. Tice, a longtime hardcore conservative (and buddy of Powerline blogger Hind/assrocket and of whoever the moron is that runs the Captain's (Hind) Quarters) is their local political editor. Ignoring the accurate and sensible analysis made earlier this week by Lori Sturdevant, the Strib's Rochelle Olson and Jackie Crosby mention Politic in Minnesota's Blois Olson's statement that the elections of Rybak and Chris Coleman (who Olson calls a "moderate") show that "fiscal liberalism is out", the implication being of course that Coleman is a DINO like the guy he just beat, Randy Kelly. Ahem. I am a St. Paulite born and bred, and I can tell you this: Chris Coleman is the son of his father, noted state legislator Nicholas Coleman -- the man who founded the DFL -- and the brother of the fire-breathingly liberal StarTribune columnist Nick Coleman. This man is no "moderate", in the Blois Olson sense of the word. They put vastly different lights on it, but both Coleman and Kelly went to great lengths in their respective campaigns to show that Coleman was a fiscal liberal in his father's DFL mold. Kelly aped the tactics of the Republicans who donated so much money to his campaign, and told us over and over and over again that Chris Coleman was This Evil Liberal Monster Who Was Going To Raise Our Taxes. Considering that Coleman is if anything more liberal than Evil Liberal John Kerry -- and John Kerry won every single one of St. Paul's precincts last year -- I leave it to you to determine how well this went over with us. And then we have poor old Doug Grow. Poor Old Doug's a old-line liberal who's become somewhat self-hating: He's spent so much time with the D.J. Tice types that he's internalized a lot of their beliefs. He believes, for instance, that the "old-school DFL" is croaked for good, and that exurbanite Republican yahoos like the Powerline boys will inherit the earth. Why? Because the liberal democrat R.T. Rybak won re-election in the Minneapolis race for mayor against the equally-liberal democrat Peter McLaughlin, even though McLaughlin had the DFL party endorsement. Whoop-tee doo. Chris Coleman won in St. Paul exactly because he had the DFL's endorsement -- which the incumbent Kelly did not have. In St. Paul, we wanted Kelly out so badly that we would have voted for a ham sandwich if the DFL had endorsed it. Furthermore, Rybak and his opponent McLaughlin are so much alike politically and in other ways that, as the Strib's Olson and Crosby reported the morning after the election, many Minneapolis residents couldn't tell them apart.
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