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September 18, 2006

The Uppity Republican

Alan Fine was the kind of Republican that every Democrat likes the most.

He's moderate; no flaming conservative, he. He's an academic. And best of all, he faces very long odds of winning.

So it's downright safe for a card-waving DFLer to get along with, even like, a guy like Fine.

Until he starts getting uppity, anyway.

Doug Grow discovered this last week:

This new Alan Fine suddenly can't say the name "Keith Ellison" without saying the name "Louis Farrakhan."

When I told him I was stunned at the tone of his statement, he said, "It's just because you like Keith Ellison."True," I said. "But I liked who I thought you were, too."You're painting me too quickly," Fine said. "Let me assure you, the Alan Fine you met is genuine."

I'm a Republican who spent years being mistaken for a Democrat, so I've been there. "You seem so much like me, says the Democrat questioning you. "How can you believe this stuff that I don't if you seem like me?

The answer, of course, is that Alan Fine probably realizes that since the local media won't spread the word about Ellison's beliefs - his years-long alliance with the Nations of Islam (which, contrary to Doug Grow's newspaper's reports ran from 1989 to at least 1997), his acceptance of support from the terrorist-apologist, anti-semitic Council on American-Islamic Relations, his coddling of cop-killers like Assata Shakur (and cop-killer wannabees like DFL darling Kathless Soliah) - to say nothing of his seeming belief that ethics are for other people - then it's his job to do it.

And outflanking the media is something that, in the Minnesota where Doug Grow cut his teeth, the pre-Reagan era in Republican politics were the GOP, victims since the forties of a sort of political Stockholm Syndrome, just wasn't done. Republicans, according to the great Minnesota Myth, were supposed to basically agree with the DFL!

And if they don't? Well, naturally, they're nekulturny. Bigots, says Grow!

I've received hate mail from lonely bigots with a gentler tone than your statement," I said. "Did you really write this statement yourself?"
I've said in the past that Doug Grow is all but a paid organ of the DFL. It was hyperbole - but with the above, you'd never know it. We have the full range of pro-Ellison talking points, as if from a checklist:
  • If you question Ellison's feeble explanations, you're a bigot.
  • Real Live Librul Joooz! support Ellison! As if one can't find all sorts of Jews who practice politics that undercut Jewish interests...
  • If you questions Ellison's feeble explanations, you're a bigot!
Grow continues:
Fine didn't really answer the question.

"I'm just talking about his pattern of behavior over time," he said.

And then he was off again, talking about Farrakhan, the controversial Nation of Islam leader, and how "these people hate whites and Jews."

I suppose all this was especially stunning because a few hours before Fine issued his statement, I had been at what turned out to be Ellison's victory celebration Tuesday night. The Blue Nile restaurant on Franklin Avenue was jammed with people of every imaginable background shaking hands, hugging and dancing while anxiously awaiting results of the vote.

In 27 years in this city, I'd never seen a more diverse gathering.

Never?

Really? The most diverse ever?

I sincerely doubt that.

And diverse how? Genuine diversity? Or the kind of diversity Alan Dershowitz famously decried at Harvard, where the word meant "...someone with dark skin or in a skirt who thinks just like you"?

Could someone in that "diverse" crowd have silenced qualms about little things like hastily-buried traces of antisemitism, the same way that feminists tranquilized their "beliefs" when they were told to close ranks behind Bill Clinton?

"This looks like the face of the Fifth District," Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak said of the event.
Right. A district that might give Pol Pot 60% of the ballot, if only the DFL endorsed him.

Seriously - as long as someone pastes the "progressive" label on themselves, what won't the Minneapolis DFL support?

Alan Fine is doing what the Strib won't; trying to make sure the voters get the whole story.

Posted by Mitch at September 18, 2006 06:06 AM | TrackBack
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