Can a little known newspaper publisher author a different ending for Tom Horner’s campaign?

If there truly exists a halfway point between gadfly and contender in the realm of politics, Independence Party gubernatorial hopeful Rob Hahn has staked his long-on-moxy and short-on-funds campaign on finding just such an electoral sweet spot. A distant undercard to the expensive heavyweight battle royale occuring on the DFL side of the ballot, the IP’s primary focus on promoting erstwhile liberal Republican Tom Horner has been complicated by the would-be William Randolph Hearst. 

While Hahn might be unknown to most voters (I passed one of the few visible signs of his campaign – a billboard near Rockford – this past week), the man claiming to be the “only real independent running for governor” has gained minor traction with the only section of the electorate paying close attention to politics in general – the media.  From announcing his running-mate selection, to calling on Horner to drop out of the race, and even his policy proposal of using riverboat gambling to enhance the state’s coffers, Hahn has been granted a level of legitimacy seemingly far surpassing his likely ability to wrest away the IP’s nod this August.  The real question may be why?

Part of the answer may have less to do with Hahn’s media background and more to do with an agenda that leans heavily on the credible side of his credible fringe candidate persona.  While Hahn’s riverboat gambling concept has received far more press than an idea that at best would only generate $400-600 million a year should get, Hahn has put forward solutions on the budget deficit that sound far more detailed than many of his opponents.  Hahn’s call alone for phasing out LGA funding and a 5-7% across-the-board cut in state government is more intricate and conservative than anything Tom Horner has publically committed to other than tax policies that are apparently to the left of even Matt Entenza.

But what may really fuel the coverage of Rob Hahn’s campaign is his willingness to attack Horner’s most publicized weakness – his unwillingness/inability to release his client list – coupled with the uncertainty of turnout for an August 10th Independence Party primary.

Horner’s lobbying with his now former firm Himle Horner has proven to be the bête noire of his campaign, leading even the Star Tribune to momentarily put down their promotion of Horner’s Republican past to wrap his knuckles over the lack of disclosure.  The issue is a classic political conundrum; Horner is legally bound to keep his clients’ identities hidden while the Strib and Hahn maintain every right to question the inherent conflicts of interest such a past entails.

Can such an issue – or any – prove powerful enough for Hahn to win?  It depends on how exactly hotly the primary will be.  The IP has come a long way since the dog days of the summer of 2000 when party officials publically worried that IP U.S. Senate nominee James Gibson might not be able to defeat the Harold Stassen of the environmental set, Leslie Davis, in the party’s primary (Davis was considered “strong” enough to be included in pre-primary polling questions).  A whopping 5,600 votes were cast that September between four candidates, leaving Gibson – and the party’s fledgling respectability – intact. 

Higher profile races since then have done little to drive turnout.  The IP’s 7 candidate U.S. Senate field in 2008 that featured former appointed Sen. Dean Barkley only saw 11,000 votes.  It would be little wonder then if at least a few political beat reporters believed Hahn capable of gaining the necessary 5,000 or 6,000 votes to pull off a mildly noticed upset.  With Horner and even long-time politicos like Doug Grow floating theories of cross-over mischief, such an outcome hasn’t been completely discounted.

More likely, Hahn’s wrath will be felt in 7-second MPR soundbites and tiny column inches buried in the metro section.  Enough perhaps to provide a respectable margin of defeat 30 days hence but not enough to provide the party’s biggest upset since their candidates wore feather boas.

Last week, we discussed the media flap over what amounts, in the end, to Tom Emmer’s not releasing details on how he plans to change Minnesota government until he actually has an opponent.

Politics In Minnesota Weekend summed up the details:

On Monday, Tom Scheck reported a piece for MPR that digs into Emmer’s publicly stated plans to downsize state government.

The Emmer campaign responds via an “Emmer Truth” section of its website, implying that claims made by Sheck’s story are inaccurate and cherry-picked.

Enter Dave Mindeman (mnpACT!) and Eric Black (MinnPost), who call EmmerTruth “pretty weak” and “winging it.” Jon Tevlin at the Strib also gets his two cents in, basically repeating the cries for Emmer to get specific.

Mitch Berg (Shot in the Dark) and Gary Gross (Let Freedom Ring) hit back, generally with two points: Scheck’s and Black’s reports wereinaccurate/mangled the context, and it’s a legitimate and sensible strategy for Team Emmer not to give up the “master plan” so early in the campaign season.

Charlie Quimby (Across the Great Divide) comments on Berg’s blog: “I think if you put Emmer’s full statement in front [of] 100 voters, not many would find it definitive or conclusive or clarified.” And Berg in reply: “As to how 100 random users would perceive Emmer’s statement … I don’t disagree; presentation counts … But is it the media’s job to relate the actual facts, or to reinforce confusion?”

A terrific question, if a little antagonistic in the wording.

Antagonistic?  Moi?

The piece, by…well, I never got the name, but it’s someone on the Politics In Minnesota staff – summed up the issues pretty well, so far.

But perhaps more to the point, there was nothing confusing in the MPR piece. In fact, both EmmerTruth and the conservative blogs skip the entire point of Scheck’s reporting while digging around in the semantics: Emmer, as a candidate, has promised major redesigns of government, but the programs and agencies he’s highlighted so far are playing with thousands or millions of dollars, not billions. The “could not should” distinction is sort of absurd.

To be fair to Gary and I, we were reacting to the presenting issue; we had leftybloggers and the media chanting “Emmer said he’d hack a third of State Government!”. 

But the real issue is the beef.

Now, to most of the Twin Cities media, that question is…:

 If the media’s job is to relate actual facts, then it’s perfectly reasonable — no, responsible — for the media to ask Emmer, the candidate for Minnesota’s highest office, what he would do if elected. If the answer is, for now, that he’s not sure, then it’s the media’s responsibility to say so.

True. 

But it’d be useful for the media to also note that Dayton (and Kelliher, Entenza and Horner’s, not that it matters) plans are no more articulate; if Emmer is saying “Cut Cut Cut!”, as John Tevlin wrote, then the Four Stooges are responding “Tax Tax Tax!”, with no more articulation.

I hate to repeat myself, but I think I summed up my most serious response to this in my response to Erik Black last week:

Black:  And [Emmer] owes the voters of Minnesota some straighter talk, not about what he could do, but what he would do to balance the budget. (Not to say that all the other guv candidates have been clear abut how they would do it. They haven’t.)

Let me get this straight:  the DFL candidates have been “unclear”, but Emmer “owes” everyone an explanation now …?

Why does the MinnPost hold Republicans to a different standard than the DFL?

When Mark Dayton and the other three soon-to-be-chum contenders appear on Midmorning with Keri Miller, will Miller press any of them for details on how their “Tax, Baby, Tax!” agenda is going to lead to more (non-public-employee union) jobs?  How they lead to recovery?  How they will defy history by actually improving the economy?

Will Nick Coleman and John Tevlin and Lori Sturdevant demand more details amid their inevitable victorian vapours?

Will Erik Black and Tom Scheck write pieces noting how vague they’re being?

So there are two questions for everyone that’s demanding answers from Emmer, the Tom Schecks and Erik Blacks and John Tevlins and Charlie Quimbies:

1. Where is the scrutiny of Dayton and the other three?  The double standard was plain as day in the Black quote above; why do you, as a group, observe it?  Or does supporting the status quo (only more of it) get one a pass with the media?
2. I asked this before, I’ll ask it again:  What is in it for Emmer to put his entire platform out there six weeks before the DFL has a candidate, for the DFL-leaning media to spin and soften up while the DFL goes through its primary contortions?  How would that benefit Emmer and the MNGOP in their quest to win the race?  Because this race isn’t about making the media’s job easier, or making the DFL’s job easier; it’s about saving Minnesota.  Why does Emmer “owe” Minnesota any more than his opponents do?

 A listening tour is a fine populist idea, but with Minnesota accumulating red ink in Deepwater Horizon-like volumes, a candidate — from any party — should be able to talk state finances in real terms. We don’t buy the idea that campaigns for office build policy proposals around a master plan that remains absolutely secret until the last possible moment.

“Last possible moment?”  Of course not.   What’s unreasonable about waiting until he faces the real opponent, as opposed to the opponent’s legions of ringers?  Because Mark Dayton isn’t his only, or even his most serious, opponent in this race.

The Tea Party and the avalanche of dissatisfaction that are at Emmer’s back are driven by a fairly articulate demand for real answers; if Emmer doesn’t do better than the “Tax Baby Tax!” crowd, that’ll be a big problem.

I”m pretty comfortable he will have the goods on August 11, when Mark Dayton finally starts his campaign.

Imagine how much  better criminal justice would be if prosecutors and judges worked with defense attorneys to speed up the judicial system?

Or if accountants and auditors were on the same team?

Or if the President, Congress and the Supreme Court spent less time checking and balancing each other, and more time working on ways to help each other increase their power?

Well, no.  They are all terrible ideas.  The whole point of having adversarial systems built into government is to ensure there’s accountability, or at the very least a speed bump in the way of unlimited power on the part of CEOs, Presidents, Governors, Congresses…

That’s why of all of Jesse Ventura’s mind-dissolvingly stupid ideas in his time-warpingly stupid administration, the dumbest of all was his constant lobotomized yapping for a unicameral legislature, so government could “get stuff done”.  Of course, keeping government from getting “stuff done” with impunity is one of the great virtues of both the bicameral legislature and the two-party system.

Of course, the Minnesota DFL has never understood this.  Their primary frame of historical reference is the period nationally between 1933 and 1980, and in Minnesota until about 2003;

This is a good thing; it means everyone’s working to hold everyone accountable.

Which may explain a lot why Doug Grow thinks this is a good idea:

The relationship between Mary Cathryn Ricker and Valeria Silva stands in sharp contrast to the common education confrontations that have dogged public education in Minnesota in recent years.

Ricker, head of the St. Paul teachers union, and Silva, the St. Paul school district’s superintendent, meet often and banter easily.

“Mary Cathryn asked me to attend a workshop (sponsored by the American Federation of Teachers),” recalled Silva.

“It was on a weekend,” Ricker said.

“I told her I’d go, but if I’m going on a weekend, it proves I must love you,” Silva said.

The two women laughed.

An alliance between the union and the superintendent’s office is no easy thing to maintain. Silva admits that even some members of her high-ranking staff are leery of how quick the superintendent is to pick up the phone and call Ricker.

Well, I’m glad someone at 360 Colborn is doing their job…

And Ricker suspects that at least some teachers are uncomfortable with a union leader who spends considerable time at district headquarters.

Which may be the most depressing commentary on the mentality in public education today that I’ve ever heard.

Silva is distressed by the public attitudes toward teachers — and the teaching profession. It’s hard enough, she said, to attract people into the profession, given the relatively meager starting paying, compared with other professions. But after years of bashing, fewer and fewer people even believe the profession deserves respect.

“Any other culture,” Silva said, “a teacher is greatly valued. That’s been lost here.”

Ms. Silva: get back to me about this episode, which your district has been trying to ignore for five years.   Until you have an answer that wouldn’t insult my dog’s intelligence, I won’t value your “profession”.

Maybe Mary Rickert will ask on my behalf?

Is the GOP a “big tent?”  Or is it a “pup tent?”

The real answer is below.

But for the biennial pundit palaver on the subject, who better to ask than Doug Grow, who spent decades carrying water for the DFL at the Strib before decamping to the MinnPost?

“The idea of a big tent means different things to different people,” Sutton told MinnPost. “I believe we are a big tent, filled with right-of-center folks. We have social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, people who believe in a strong national defense. There’s a business wing, and we have those people who have a libertarian/populist streak. … But the unifier is the economy. People are anxious about the economy, about their jobs. That makes people more conservative. Business. Jobs. That’s our brand.”

Sutton, as should be expected, gets it right; the GOP should be open to everyone who believes in small government, prosperity for the individual, security and family.

And who better to ask about our tent size than someone who got kicked out of it for supporting bigger government and higher taxes?

But former Rep. Neil Peterson, who was drummed out of his party and office by conservative forces in Bloomington after joining five other House Republicans in overriding Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s veto of a gasoline tax, has a different view. He says the delegates gathering for this convention are not even close to the party regulars who supported him.

“When I was in office, we still had a fairly big tent in my district,” Peterson said. “But those people [the party activists] have all been replaced by much more conservative people. The party has moved from being a big tent to a pup tent.”

And Grow, like much of the Twin Cities media, audibly pines for the days when the GOP was basically nothing more than the DFL with better suits – a half-hearted speed bump to complete DFL domination.

The real answer is “the tent is as big as it needs to be; all who support prosperity, limited government, security and the family are welcome.”

It’s really pretty simple.  If you’re not a reporter with decades of experience covering Minnesota politics, anyway.

I’ve spent much of the life of this blog – eight years, now – railing against the evils of smearing by association. 

It’s a particularly slimy tactic in the hands of the not-very-bright, on all sides of the putative political aisle.  Being a conservative, I bag on particularly egregiously stupid examples from the left (like this, that, the other thing, this, and of course this), but of course it’s not limited to a party.  Much.

Still, there are those from whom we expect better.  Or like to think we do.

Erik Black at the MinnPost – the dean of Minnesota political reporters (or, I guess, one of a classroom full of deans, once you add in Pat Kessler, Mary LaHammer and Bill Salisbury), makes noises about also rejecting the whole stupid game in this piece about the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which Governor Pawlenty will be attending:

In February, Gov. Tim Pawlenty will take his undeclared campaign for the Republican presidential nomination back to Washington, D.C., for the Conservative Political Action Conference. CPAC, as it is always called, is a  major annual gathering of conservatives and an opportunity for Repub candidates and might-be candidates to strut their stuff before various elements of the party base (although CPAC, which is put on by the American Conservative Union, is technically non-partisan).

Among the co-sponsors of the conference one finds a name one hasn’t heard much since the mid-20th century — the John Birch Society. As a refugee from that century, I can tell you that when your mom and I were kids the “Birchers” (I use the term I grew up using and mean no offense by it) were a leading symbol of right-wing extremism.

Of course, “right wing extremism” is a term that’s more or less lost all meaning, largely because of the efforts of the news media of which Eric Black has been a part for his entire working life.  I joke about it; “if a fiscal-conservative socially-libertarian constitutional originalist orders a pizza in the woods and no liberal is there to hear him, is he still an extremist?”, I ask, constantly, when people refer on the left and in the media (pardon, as always, the redundancy) to everyone from Tom Tancredo to (this makes me mildly dizzy) Tim Pawlenty as “extremists”. 

But Black, being all responsible, rejects the whole stupid game.

Or…does he?

So this is an obvious set-up to play the always popular “dissociate yourself” card. Under the rules of that card game, everyone involved in CPAC (including Pawlenty, as a speaker) has to repudiate the Birchers or be tainted by association with the most extreme thing the group ever said or did. It’s fun and easy to play (see Barack Obama and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright) but also stupid and demeaning (ibid). A letter-writer to the Strib played the card early this week, asserting that Pawlenty’s attendance would amount to an endorsement of Bircher views.

Well, so far, so good – although I think it’s fair to observe that the MinnPost is no better than the rest of the left-leaning mainstream media at focusing attention on the right’s fringe players; the nutcase with the racist sign at the Tea Party, the stars-‘n-bars-flying redneck at the Second Amendment rally, the Tenth Amendment’s long-dead associations with slave-owners-rights.

But Black is better than that.  Isn’t he?

I actually did inquire of the spokester for Pawlenty’s undeclared campaign whether the governor might want to comment on whether his willingness to speak at an event co-sponsored by the John Birch Society implied any association between his views and theirs, but the calls and emails (over several days) received no reply.

And why would that be?  Because Black works for an organization that is pretty up-front about working for the “enemy?”  Or merely because the very question is, to quote Black himself in the context of this very issue, “stupid and demeaning?”

Still, I cannot bring myself to play the card.

Am I overly cynical, or do I detect a silent, implied “when did the Governor stop beating his wife?” in Black’s repudiation of the whole “stupid, demeaning” issue?

Because if there is no story there – if there is no evidence throughout Pawlenty’s career of any sympathy, overt or otherwise, for the Birchers – then why write about it at all?

I was surprised and interested to learn that the John Birch Society was still in business. But, as this recent NYTimes where-are-they-now feature indicates, they are still kicking, based in Grand Chute, Wis., (near Appleton, Oshkosh, Green Bay), still believing in what its leaders call a satanic conspiracy to take over the world.

Right.

So what?

Black gives a brief lesson on the history of the Birchers – they’re anti-UN, anti-Communist, and have espoused some pretty wacky things over the decades – and then cuts to what passes for his chase:

So, back to the present. If Tim Pawlenty wants to be president, he certainly must say what he thinks the U.S. relationship to the U.N. should be, but he doesn’t have to start from any particular that he agrees with the long-standing JBS position just because he spoke at a conference co-sponsored by the JBS.

Right.  Especially since “sponsorship” is a come-one, come-all thing, as opposed to an implication that a “sponsor” has any special ideological traction:

Of course, Pawlenty is no more implicated in JBS’s beliefs than any of the many other speakers, which includes other leading undeclared presidential candidates such as Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. Mike Huckabee was scheduled but has canceled. Sarah Palin was invited but has declined. The current list of speakers, co-sponsors and exhibitors is available here.

Right.

So – the story is…what?  That no candidate needs to apologize for being at an event sponsored (in tiny measure) by a splinter group that nobody’s taken seriously since the Johnson Administration?

Why, that’d be like saying that one needn’t discount the opinion of Mark Dayton, Margaret Anderson-Kelliher, Steve Kelley, John Marty and Taryll Clark even though none of them have renounced the activities of International ANSWR (who are involved in much left-wing agitation), since none of them have expressly shown sympathy for America’s last Stalinist fringe group.  It’d be another “why did you stop beating your wife” moment.

Pawlenty needs to improve on that showing more than he needs to repudiate the John Birch Society, but he really needs to return my calls anyway.

To answer a question that Black himself considered “stupid and demaning?”

Just curious.

A few years back, incontinent shriekblogger Karl Bremer jumped up and down and shot steam out his nostrils and bellowed that the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers was a conservative organization.  To be fair, Bremer always jumps up and down and squirts steam out his ears, so it’s not that big a distinction…

…but the main point is that the MOB is, and has always been, intended to be utterly non-partisan.  That it is largely conservative could be chalked up to any number of reasons – I suspect it’s that way too many liberals really really can’t tolerate cognitive dissonance – but the proof is in the pudding; our seminnual MOB parties have welcomed people of every political stripe, from Swiftee to Eva Young to Eric Black.

At any rate, Flash from Centrisity is one of the MOB’s charter members.  He’s a center-lefty, and so is his blog.

But just as Flash and I go way back beyond blogging and politics (we’ve been friends and neighbors since long before either of us thought “blog” was anything other than a post-drunken-burrito-frenzy kind of bodily noise), his blog often enough focuses on the sorts of things that should unite us all; family (including his years-long narratives about his songs, including Sergeant Tom, who just got out of the Marines), community, and most importantly, beer:

Yes folks, Global Climate Change has been officially confirmed.

Today, January 15, 2010 at 4:22 PM, Spring arrived in the Midway. On tap, Natural Ice! I need the 5.9% alcohols to keep the lines clear LOL

Flash’s kegerator has long been not only the social center of the central Midway for almost a generation – but its’ first tapping of the season is always the great harbinger of spring in this part of Saint Paul.  The ceremonial first tapping is usually a sign that winter is over.

(But…January 15?  The phrase “Beerational Exuberance” springs to mind.   I’ll discuss it at the garage sometime this next weekend).

In reading Doug Grow’s account of A-Klo’s “Tele-Town Hall” “meeting”, it occurs to me…

One caller tried hard to pin her down.

“Do you support a public (health insurance) option?” he asked.

That seemed to call for a “yes” or “no” answer.

The caller got neither.

Sen. Amy KlobucharInstead, here’s what he got: “I will tell you this,” the senator said. “I’m open to a competitive option. You need to put pressure on the insurance companies. One way to do that [is allow the public to join] the federal health care plan or one just like it. The government does administer it, but it’s a private plan. That’s one way. And then there’s this co-op plan proposal [in the Senate]. That really hasn’t been formed yet. Those are some of the ideas. I want to make sure whatever option we choose works for our state. Make sure it makes it easier for small businesses and the self-employed.”

…that in the wake of Minnesota’s eight-month recount ordeal, that Minnesota has gone from having one Senataor in DC…

…to none.

Eric Black reports on the Project for Excellence in Journalism report on the State of the News Media.

It’s an ugly report – you can read the details at MinnPost.  Black’s conclusion:

I heard PEJ chief Tom Rosenstiel (disclosure: Tom and I went to college together less than one century ago; he’s a nice guy) on the radio today say that he doesn’t believe the day when a major American city will have no newspaper is imminent. I agree with that (although what’s happening in Detroit, where you can only get home delivery three days a week is frightening). The papers that have been folding are in two-newspaper towns.

So far.

Again, read the whole article.
On a quasi-unrelated note, I noticed that I haven’t gone to the Strib for blog fodder in quite some time now…

Growing up, I dreamed – among a few other things – of being a news reporter.  Let’s just say it’s a good thing not every dream comes true.

But I digress.

One of my “role models”, of sorts, was “Joe Rossi”, a character played by Robert Walden from the Lou Grant TV series.  One of the things about “Rossi” that I remember admiring, and to which I aspired, was fanatical detachment from everything – groups, people, society – supported by a hard-bitten cynicism about just about everything else.  “Rossi” went overboard, of course; never voted, never joined any groups, never did anything that’d compromise this detachment (which was sent up in a memorable episode in which the rest of the staff, in an orgy of chain-yanking, signed Rossi up for every organization they could – the AARP, the NRA, severel political parties, the AAA…

OK, it was  TV show – but that was one of the things (supported by my later experience and a little formal education in the field) that I carried with me through my brief, fruitless career as a reporter; reporters should have a healthy skepticism about everything.
Including reporters.

And I suspect most reporters would agree – at least as a platitude.

That needs, of course, to be combined with ravenous curiosity (which was one part of the craft that I did get right), including the ability to question ones’ own gaps and, dare I say, preconceptions.  We’ll come back to that.

“Skepticism”, of course, has its limits.  Reporters are human; they follow baseball teams, they read books, they vote – they have preferences.  None of them – not even “Joe Rossi” – attains their perfect ideals, whatever thepy are. So it’s not a surprise that, among other sins, reporters are just as big a bunch of fanboys as the rest of us, when you get down to it.  Or so it’d seem, seeing the coverage of Seymour Hersh’s appearance last week at the U of M, as partof the U’s “Great Conversations” program.

I didn’t go – I don’t think the “U” is especially aggressive about inviting non-believers to these things, but I have no idea, honestly.

But it was all over the place; Hersh dropped a few “bombs” (as reported by the local media, who did attend in droves) that got picked up by the big leftymedia.

More on that angle in a bit.

Eric Black of the MinnPost was there:

At a “Great Conversations” event at the University of Minnesota last night, legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh may have made a little more news than he intended by talking about new alleged instances of domestic spying by the CIA, and about an ongoing covert military operation that he called an “executive assassination ring.”

Heady stuff!

Hersh spoke with great confidence about these findings from his current reporting, which he hasn’t written about yet.

In an email exchange afterward, Hersh said that his statements were “an honest response to a question” from the event’s moderator, U of M Political Scientist Larry Jacobs and “not something I wanted to dwell about in public.”

Of course, when it comes to “covert executive assassination squads”, you don’t have to do a lot of “dwelling” for the story to grab attention, do you?

Hersh didn’t take back the statements, which he said arise from reporting he is doing for a book, but that it might be a year or two before he has what he needs on the topic to be “effective…that is, empirical, for even the most skeptical.”

Hersh, who is most famous (recently) for releasing the Abu Ghraib story (which the Army had been investigating, and which CBS was sitting on at government request) must be complimented for his focus on “empiricism”.

You might be too, if you’d had enough of your claims – apparently the less-“empirical” ones – turn out to be complete squibs.  I’ll direct you to this story from two years ago; Hersh claimed (amid a flurry of publicity) that US Special Forces were operating in Iran, preparatory to a US invasion.  It’s a claim that’d seem to have fallen down the memory hole; I have read no accounts of any of the journalists present at this or any other appearance questioning Hersh about it.
So perhaps it’s a good thing he’s waiting.  Except for the whole “Dropping the bomb in a talk at the U of M” bit.

The evening of great conversation, featuring Walter Mondale and Hersh, moderated by Jacobs and titled “America’s Constitutional Crisis,” looked to be a mostly historical review of events that have tested our Constitution, by a journalist and a high government officials who had experience with many of the crises.

Or, in Mondale’s case, were intimately involved in causing the crises.

Again, I digress.

Black continues:

And it was mostly historical, and a great conversation, in which Hersh and Mondale talked about the patterns by which presidents seem to get intoxicated by executive power, frustrated by the limitations on that power from Congress and the public, drawn into improper covert actions that exceed their constitutional powers, in the belief that they can get results and will never be found out. Despite a few references to the Founding Fathers, the history was mostly recent, starting with the Viethnam War with much of it arising from the George W. Bush administration, which both men roundly denounced.

Nothing like working a relentlessly friendly room.

That’s not a digression.

We’re getting into the interesting stuff here:

At the end of one answer by Hersh about how these things tend to happen, Jacobs asked: “And do they continue to happen to this day?”

Replied Hersh:

“Yuh. After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen.

And we’ll wait for the evidence on that.

I’m not saying I doubt it, necessarily – it’s just that I hope Mr. Hersh isn’t too busy waiting for the invasion of Iran to show us the evidence.  Someday.

Now, here we get into the part of the story where it might have been useful to have some journalists in the room with Mr. Hersh:

“Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command — JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. …

Let’s take a brief time-out here.

Re-read Hersh’s explanation of JSOC.  Assuming Black is reporting his words accurately (and I’ve expressed my complete confidence in the honest of Eric Black’s reporting in the past), Hersh explains JSOC as if…:

1. He expects nobody has heard of it (probably not an unfair assumption, given his audience)
2. He wants people to believe that its status is something unique, sinister, and unique to the Bush Administration.

It’s buncombe, of course.  Joint Special Operations Command was established so that key, vital, high-risk special operations – hostage rescues, counterterrorist missions and the like – could take place without the paralyzing overburden of the military’s bureaucracy and its effects on these types of operations.

And it reports to the Executive Branch – the Secretary of Defense – rather than Congress; of course, the entire Executive Branch reports to the Executive Branch!  But JSOC is isolated from much of the miltiary’s bureaucracy; it does things that need to be done without bringing 535 other commanders into the chain of command.  JSOC reports to the Secretary of Defense, and thence to the President and Congress.

This chain of command – directly to the highest ranks of power – was established  after an infamous military disaster caused by, among other things, interservice bureaucracy, and micromanagment by civilian officials.

The disaster was “Desert One”.  And the order to create JSOC came from President Jimmy Carter.  The boss of Hersh’s fellow guest on the panel, former Vice President
Walter Mondale.

A roomful of journalists might have known that.

“Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.

And I’m sure we’ll wait for evidence of the “executions”, in Hersh’s book, upcoming in a year or so.

But barring that “evidence”, there’s a point of order here:  the military doesn’t have to clear its operations with ambassadors or the CIA!  The military doesn’t report to either of them!

There’s no question that JSOC – the umbrella for the US’ clandestine military, including the Joint Special Operations Detachment Delta (“Delta Force”) and the Navy’s DEVGRU (formerly “Seal Team Six”) – does things that aren’t supposed to see the light of day.  And some of these things are by their very nature controversial.  Mark Bowden chronicled the Clinton-era use of JSOC troops to track and kill Medellin drug boss Pablo Escobar; one wonders where the chorus of demands for constitutional due process were back then?

It’s not an idle question for any democracy; in the UK during “The Troubles”, Britain’s Special Air Service – the unit that “Delta” and many of the world’s other special forces are modeled after – garnered decades of controversy in its clandestine surveillance and, in some cases, direct action against the IRA.  While Britain’s constitution recognizes a closer relationship between the military and civil authority than we have in the US – something that helped spawn our tradition of Posse Comitatus, in fact – it’s the sort of thing that a free society needs to watch out for and be aware of.

But, until we get Hersh’s “evidence”, really, all we have is innuendo
A roomful of journalists might have known this, and asked Hersh to square his account with history and, while we’re at it, JSOC’s stated organization, oversight structure and (since it can be reasonably assumed Walter Mondale was there) three-decade-long mission.

“It’s complicated because the guys doing it are not murderers, and yet they are committing what we would normally call murder. It’s a very complicated issue. Because they are young men that went into the Special Forces. The Delta Forces you’ve heard about. Navy Seal teams. Highly specialized.

“In many cases, they were the best and the brightest. Really, no exaggerations. Really fine guys that went in to do the kind of necessary jobs that they think you need to do to protect America. And then they find themselves torturing people.

“I’ve had people say to me — five years ago, I had one say: ‘What do you call it when you interrogate somebody and you leave them bleeding and they don’t get any medical committee and two days later he dies. Is that murder? What happens if I get before a committee?’

“But they’re not gonna get before a committee.”

Really?

Why?

Because the Obama Administration has found that there’s nothing illegal about what Bush sent JSOC to do?  Distasteful to modern, urban, urbane, small-l-liberal (and usually big-l-Liberal) products of the university system, perhaps, but not illegal?  Indeed, necessary under the circumstances – just as Jimmy Carter found when he plugged the whole thing in three decades ago?

A roomful of journalists might not have known this – but, armed by the skepticism that I and probably not a few of them used to think was a key part of the trade, you’d have thought someone might have asked.

A roomful of star-struck hero worshippers?  Not so much.

Am I being unfair in characterizing the room – people paralyzed, if not by Walter Mondale’s suffocating gravitas, by Hershs’ reputation as, as Black put it…:

…the best-known investigative reporter of his generation…

…as a bunch of star-struck fanboys? Who are acting like the shrimp-league lefty commenter on Marty Owings’ show last weekend whose entire line was “who are you to question Sy Hersh?”

Maybe.

But just as someone has to question the government – and its servants, like JSOC – someone needs to subject Seymour Hersh to some skepticism, too.

And I’m sure that roomful of Journalists will do just that.

After Hersh gets done covering that invasion of Iran he warned us about.

So the MOB party was last night.  It was the first one we’ve done in about 18 months.  I expected sort of a “rebuilding season” kinda vibe to the party, with maybe 40-odd people showing up.

I counted a total fo a little over 70 over the course of the evening, with probably a little over fifty in the room at one time at the party’s peak.

Being the peripatetic sort (and having heard once upon a time it’s a good host’s job to make sure everyone meets everyone else), I did my best to actually try to meet, if not have a meaningful conversation, with everyone there, just to get an idea of how showed up, and from where.

My attempts to get everyone are usually laughably incomplete, but here goes:

• Lileks, of course, with the Giant Swede and a significant-looking other.
• Bob Davis of KSTP-AM
• Laura and David Hemler, fans, activists, and longtime friends of the NARN
• Joel Rosenberg and Felicia Herman
• Gary M. Miller, Jeff Kouba and (I believe) Paul from Truth Vs. The Machine
• Casey, an intern reporter from The Daily Planet
• Jeff Rosenberg of the Daily Liberal MN Publius
• Mini-Flash 2.0 – Flash’s (Centrisity) doppleganger.
• Tom “Swiftee” Swift
• Jordan Mason  – formerly of the Taxpayers League – and lucky guy Mark Wernimont.
• The entire Night Writer clan; John “Night Writer” Stewart, the Reverend Mother, Mall Diva, Tiger Lily and Uncle Ben.
• Mr. D – of blog and comment section fame.
• Former MOB Mayor Andy “Andee Applecowskee” Aplikowski and Carrie (bka “Spurringirl”).
• Enge and his daughter
• Doug “Crossword Bebop” Bass and at least one of his kids
• Half of the McCollow/Pivec/Hubble clan; Katie (formerly of Yucky Salad with Bones) and husband Mike, sister MLP (from Casual Sundays) and – !!! – husband Jay Pivec, who was my college’s basketball coach back in 1984, whom I’d not seen in 25 years, who is the head coach at Minneapolis Community Technical College, and who earlier that every evening had won the game that’d send MCTC to nationals, along with the youngest sister and Katie’s twin/friend (whose names both elude me yet again).
• King Banaian and Janet B of SCSU Scholars, and King’s friend Ken Doyle.
• A couple of NARN2 Webstream viewers, including Wendy “Tolowen” and a couple others whose names have dodged me.
• Comment section regular Just Plain Angry
• Jamie Delton of Delton Digest and his friend, er, Shawn/Sean (sp?)
• Marty Andrade
• John “Policy Guy” LaPlante
• David Strom and Margaret Martin
• Duke Powell, former Burnsville state rep and new blogger at Ambulancedriver.com, who had to leave early to, well, drive an ambulance.
• Matt Abe of North Star Liberty
• Chief, Guy and Lassie from Freedom Dogs
• Fresch Fisch
• Joe “Learned Foot” Tucci from Kool Aid Report
• Leo Pusateri of “Psychmeister’s Ice Palace” and, er, Mrs. Pusateri
• Marty Stanchfield, promotions whiz, with the hit of the evening, the Obama spinny-head doll (Thanks, Marty!)
• Kevin Ecker
• Chris from Rocket’s Red Glare
• Barry Hickethier
• the Other Chris, from BuddhaPatriot
• And of course, Mayor Johnny Roosh and the first lady, Mrs. Roosh!
• Commenter Jim C.

I apologize to anyone I missed; I did my best to reconstruct the list from pure, overtaxed memory.
Special thanks to Terry and Virginia Keegan,who made room for the party after I, ahem, neglected to tell them we’d be descending on them (and thanks to Barry for tipping them off last week, averting disaster…)

We’ll do another one this summer, likely at a more spacious location (details being arranged).

And the long-joked-about MOB Day at the Range – wherein a MOB party would start at a firing range and move to a bar of some sort (in that order and no other), long spoke of tongue-in-cheek, actually has a better-than-even chance of happening this year.  Stay tuned.

UPDATE:  D’oh.  And Eric Black from the MinnPost.

Was disappointed to see the MinnPost’s David Brauer didn’t show up to recreate his ambulance scene with Duke.  Also hoping some of the MPR crowd can make it next time!

UPDATE 2:  Yep, Brad and Jen Carlson were there, too.  I reconstructed the list by who I saw sitting where; the Carlsons’ table had all sorts of people who were harder for me to remember, so I mentally kept going “I’ll get back to them!” every time I typed out names from that table.  But I didn’t.  Until now, I mean…

My quicker take on Brian Lambert’s take on Katherine Kersten’s departure from the Strib:  He’s irredeemably wrong, for reasons that are largely due to personal and vocational myopia.

I told you it’d be quick.

But that’s not all that satisfying, is it?

———-

A couple of points, just as background. 

• I used to be a reporter.  I was a decent writer, and could cover a story, but I never really had the urge to immerse myself in making it in the field.  My career began and ended as a freelancer, in between radio jobs.  I was perfectly fine with that then, and even moreso now.
• Most “journalists” honestly believe that they are objective, or at least detached.  With that in mind, they also believe that the organizations for which they work, individually and institutionally, are too. 
• Many “journalists” also believe that they are part of a higher calling.  The journalist’s trade has a collective mythology about it, studded with catchphrases like “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted” and “Woodward and Bernstein” and “keeping an eye on the powerful”, and “fairness, clarity and balance”. 
• These catchphrases animate a lot of “journalists” through the lean years of what is, for most reporters, a lean, niggling, awful career that, even when times were good, usually didn’t pay all that well or lead to any particular distinction.  The attitude is the same one that drives people in a lot of spartan, tenuous careers – religious monks and policemen jump to mind.  All fo them voluntarily immerse themselves in a spartan, aescetic life in pursuit of what they see as a greater good.  Few people get rich in any of the fields; most careers are nasty, brutish and brutish and, while monks and cops can retire from the field, reporters rarely do. 
• With that immersion comes a sense of exceptionalism.  With exceptionalism comes an “us against them” attitude.  With “Journalists”, that attitude is expressed via a belief that journalists are “high priests of knowledge”; that only a trained, qualified journalist can really tell a story clearly, truthfully and effectively.

And a couple more:

• An aphorism for you:  From Sacramento, Boise is “way out east”.
• Keeping the above in mind:  if a conservative orders a pizza in the woods, and a “sacramento” liberal is there to hear it, the liberal will hear “racism”, “whining”, “extremism” and “hate”.  Among other things.  Simultaneously.
• Oh, yeah; the latest meme:  No matter what their tone (to say nothing of facts), a conservative pointing out any anti-conservative institutional bias is always “whining”. 

Now, it’s been over twenty years since anyone mistook Brian Lambert for fair, balanced or non-partisan.  For years, he carried water for the DFL as the Pioneer Press‘ broadcasting columnist, until he went to work (very briefly) as then-Senator Mark Dayton’s short-lived re-election campaign.  He’s been bouncing among the Twin Cities’ online publications (and a stint as the liberal point to Sarah Janecek’s counterpoint on a short-lived KTLK-FM afternoon drive show).  He’d be one of those “from Sacramento, Boise is far east” liberals; from his perspective, the Star/Tribune probably does seem stodgy, establishment and “conservative”. 

And like most Twin Cities’ lefties, he’s happy to see Katherine Kersten leaving the Strib.  Like most journalists, he probably figured the Strib was pretty fair and balanced before all those meddling kids conservatives showed up.

In this case, the Powerguys:

The “boys”, Scott Johnson, John Hinderaker and Paul Mirengoff are worth mentioning here because they have played a critical role in this latest episode of self-abasement by Minnesota’s largest news organization

Editorial balance is “Self-Abasement”, when a conservative is involved.

While the Strib has always been attacked by right-wingers, usually for not adequately parroting the same talking points read off by Jason Lewis, Hugh Hewitt and the rest, the Power Line trio, Hinderaker and Johnson in particular, put a snake rattle in Anders Gyllenhaal’s head.

You can chalk that statement up to any number of things; I’ll chalk it up to Lambert being in “Sacramento” while Anders Gyllenhall is in “Boise” (as I sit in my office in Pittsburgh talking to most Americans, who are somewhere between Des Moines and Chicago).  But I keep trying to ask left-ish media types – can you show me where the Strib’s editorial/op-ed pages have ever been fair, to say nothing of sympathetic, to any of the principles of the center-right?  Forget about the hot-button issues like abortion and gun control; can you remember ever the Strib’s editorial board presenting a balanced view of, say, social security reform?  Government growth?  Local Aid to Government?  Cutting deficits by cutting spending rather than raising taxes?  School choice vs. the untrammelled power of the teachers’ union?  Parental notification? 

Can you remember the Strib doing a hatchet-job that benefitted anyone but a DFLer?

Get back to us on that one.

And when you do, tell us how that “balance” would actually be “parroting Rush Limbaugh, Hugh Hewitt and Jason Lewis”. 

Their legalistic, grad-school punditry, high standing among echo chamber “base” Republicans, combined with Time magazine declaring them “Blog of the Year” after their assault on Dan Rather…

“Assault on Dan Rather”.

You read that right.

Pay no attention to the forged dox, the impossible scenario, the implausible backstory; Dan Rather was the victim, says Brian Lambert, on his way to his inevitable (indeed, boilerplate) conclusion that conservatives are whining.

Now, it has never been proven that it was Power Line specifically who pushed Gyllenhaal to commit himself to a conservative “counter balance” to Nick Coleman, but Coleman himself aside, I’ve yet to hear anyone at the Strib doubt that that’s the way it went down.

So?

What if it’s true?  Indeed, it should be true; it was Nick Coleman’s gutless, factually-vacant assault on Scott Johnson that brought the issue to a head; it was the sheer feckless factlessness of it all, one might think, that convinced Gyllenhall, the Strib‘s former editor, that he had a real problem on his hands.

There are idiot ranters who don’t give a damn about facts and fairness. They can be ignored. And then there are well-educated, well-connected ranters who craft cleverly parsed, fact-like assertions and make demons out of those who show them no respect. Those are more difficult to ignore.

Question:  Why would one “ignore” the case that Powerline built against the Strib?  Over the course of almost seven years of writing, and countless articles detailing with lawyerly precision the crimes of Jim Boyd, Anders Gyllenhaal, Doug Grow, Lori Sturdevant and Nick Coleman against truth (to say nothing of balance and fairness), what’s to ignore?

Oh, yeah.  “They’re not journalists”.

That may not be exactly how Lambert would put it – “it has never been proven that Brian Lambert thinks only journalists are qualified to criticize journalism”, to paraphase Lambert – but really, what else could be behind it?

The point here is that Power Line in effect created the conflict that required the Strib to hire a Katherine Kersten and then pretty much delivered Kersten herself as the solution.

Powerline created decades of institutional bias?  They “created” the arrogance and incompetence that led Jim Boyd to slander them?   That led Nick Coleman to take a personal, defamatory (not remotely factual, certainly not “journalistically valid or ethical”) swipe at Scott Johnson?

Remember – Lambert is one of those lefty pundits that accuses conservatives of playing the victim.

———-

Let’s go back to the background points:  Journalists often see themselves as a class above and beyond the hoi polloi; they have a higher calling; they “paid their dues” in the “trenches” of the field, telling the truth when nobody else can; they often see themselves as being in the world, but not of it. 

I use the term “high priests of knowledge”.  Any given reporter may dispute that term, but it’s usually a difference of degree, not accuracy.

Kersten’s big problem, other than conservatism itself?

She’d never taken those same monastic vows:

Her arrival on the metro pages sent a clear message. Here was a purely partisan pundit with no reporting experience whatsoever. Moreover she was being set in place, with instant equal standing to a couple old dogs who had spent decades covering every imaginable facet of local culture…

So?

Nick Coleman spent decades covering city council meetings and one-car accidents, learning (let’s be charitable) to write clearly and effectively, just like every “journalist” does when “paying his dues”. 

And then, he became a columnist.  Someone who markets not fact, but observation, “insight”, and opinion.  One whose opinions led him to get a job as a talk show host on the local Air America affiliate, Lambert doesn’t trouble to add (he was a regular guest on Coleman’s abortive trainwreck of a morning show).

One has the right to ignore Coleman’s immense ideological baggage, and focus myopically on his “old dog”-ness as more of a qualification than Kersten’s background (academia and punditry).

But you’ll wait in vain for a defense that goes into greater depth than “because he’s a journalist, dammit”. 

Kersten became the ying-to-Coleman’s-yang, the quid pro quo, the internal countershot.That’s another way of saying that Nick saw Kersten for what she was, and for who and what she represented, (right-wing journalism haters and Power Line, who to be clear, delight in vilifying Coleman) and Nick rose to the fight, caution be damned. (Nick is Irish. He can’t help it. It’s an ethnic curse.)

Part of that ethnic curse, perhaps, is that our Scandinavian anscestors used to loot, pillage and dominate Coleman and Lambert’s Irish anscestors with little more trouble than Johnson and Hinderaker chewing up Coleman’s writing.

Here’s the big finish:

As I tried to get across in the Rake piece and in countless blogs since, I had no quarrel at all with the Strib hiring a conservative metro columnist. They needed one. The problem was hiring a conservative columnist who was first, foremost and solely a partisan voice. Had they found someone on staff or around town who had the breadth and depth of experience Nick Coleman and Doug Grow had acquired from years of covering the full spectrum of culture;

 And now we’re into the interesting stuff. 

Several questions, Brian Lambert:

1. Given the relentless “progressive” nature of the field of Journalism, where would a conservative candidate come from?  Countless surveys show that less than 15% of reporters vote to the right of center.
2. Most editors – certainly most Strib editors – aren’t all that far to the right of Brian Lambert.  They’re “Boise” to his “Sacramento”.  Which of them is going to promote a “Chicago” to the opinion page? 
3. Given the dearth of conservatives in newsrooms that proceed to “old dog”-itude, where does one find conservatives to serve in that role that you, yourself, acknowledge above was needed?
4. Why do you assume that only an “old dog” reporter can tell a story?

Lambert is – consciously? – echoing Nick Coleman’s infamous, pedantic, supremely arrogant justification for his own position and status

But that’s my defense: I show my face in public. I have been a reporter longer than most bloggers have been alive, which makes me, at 54, ready for the ash heap. But here’s what really makes bloggers mad: I know stuff.

I covered Minneapolis City Hall, back when Republicans controlled the City Council. I have reported from almost every county in the state, I have covered murders, floods, tornadoes, World Series and six governors.

In other words, I didn’t just blog this stuff up at midnight.

Nick Coleman “knows stuff” – because he was a reporter.

Top-flight lawyers?  Economists?  Career guys and keen observers?  Divorced guys on their third careers?   Ivy-league trained thinkers?

If they didn’t spend thirty years sitting in City Council meetings (or writing about TV shows, apparently), then they are not of the order. 

It’s not the ability to observe, to build a case, to tell the story, to make sense.  It’s that thirty years of ticket punching that really counts. 

I don’t think anyone outside “the order” buys that anymore.

All that said, it is a giant, groaning pity Gyllenhaal’s successors chose to wipe both Kersten and Coleman off the company ledger. But then it’s break-up-the-furniture-for-fuel time at the Strib. The only thing that’ll add loud, resonating insult to injury to this move is if Avista Capital Partners’ newsroom managers keep … a gossip columnist in place instead of two people who, say what you will, waded into serious, relevant issues and provoked constant reader reaction.

Well, I never said that Lambert was always wrong.

(more…)

Perhaps predictably, the best line in Eric Black’s takedown of the Strib’s buyout of Kersten and Coleman is at the end:

Pardon the football analogy (by the way, I’m on the Tarvaris bandwagon) but this Strib decision feels like trying to run out the clock when you’re behind by three touchdowns.

Even I wasn’t aware of how dumb Avista’s been playing it lately:

When the editors decided to ban the columnists from writing about politics in the last days of the recent election campaign, it was obvious that they thought controversy was not interesting. They thought it was DANGEROUS.Now this. Don’t just make them be dull. Make them be gone. Make everyone write in that same I-don’t-exist voice of the omniscient narrator (who knows all but won’t quite tell you the most interesting stuff he knows, because it might DANGEROUS).

Over at Powerline, Scott Johnson half agrees with me. Dumping the Coleman column “strengthens the paper,” Johnson writes. But Kersten, by virtue of her conservatism, “speaks for many in Minnesota who now are voiceless in the mainstream media.”

I disagree with Johnson about what the paper hopes to accomplish. They are seeking safety, but they won’t find it this way.

Not sure that Coleman was “dangerous” in the sense Black suggests, but the larger point is a good one.  The paper is weaker without Coleman.

Given that there is no shortage of mushy-left opinion at the Strib (including most of the editorial board), it should go without saying that whatever op-ed “credibility” the paper thought it had is circling the drain apace.

Now that the Minnesoros “Independent” has accomplished its mission of serving as a local-regional propaganda outlet for the mid-to-far left – a sort of local analogue to “Media Matters” and “MoveOn”, even as far as sharing some of the same funding sources – and the election is over…

…the reason for having the “Independent” has apparently passed.  The Center for “Independent” Media has yanked the budget leash on its’ “independent” vassals affiliates.

The first sign?  The “Independent” has started whacking its staff:

A couple more names are victims of budget-cutting at Minnesota Independent: full-timer Andy Birkey and politics freelancer Britt Robson.

Birkey had covered LGBT issues for the site since its August 2006 inception; he was one of two staffers axed, along with reporter Molly Priesmeyer.

The last time I knew anything of the “Independent”‘s financials, the “writers” got a stipend for working part-time for the glorified blog.  I’d suspect – and will try to dig up info – that when they brought on former journalist and ex-City Pages editor Steve Perry, it came along with a big, and currently unnecessary, jump in funding.

But I’ve come to look forward to staff departures at the “Independent”, because it seems that’s when the actual truth comes out.  When Eric Black left, he let slip the Mindy’s Soros connection (the worst-kept secret in the Twin Cities alt-media). 

And now, Britt Robson – one of the Mindy’s few capable better writers, unencumbered by having to carry the water for his overlords in DC, lets fly (emphasis added):

Robson became a casualty when MnIndy’s parent, the D.C.-based Center for Independent Media (CIM), eliminated the freelance budget entirely…However, Robson — who writes about arts for MinnPost and sports for The Rake — was caustic in his view [of] MnIndy’s Capitol overlords. He says CIM’s national staff was less interested in the organization’s professed mission — “a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that operates an independent online news network in the public interest” — than boosting the party of Barack Obama.

“I was working with them fairly closely during the Republican convention and privy to interoffice emails,” Robson explains. “The type of things non-local editors were into were very party-race stories, particularly stories that embarrassed Republicans and promoted Democrats.”

Wow.

Kinda exactly like the Mindy’s critics have been saying all along, you mean?

Robson believes the local staff chafed at this purposefulness; they consider themselves progressives, not DFL party hacks. He points to Perry’s tenure as City Pages editor, when staffers went after Republicans hard but regularly gnawed the legs off local Democrats such as R.T. Rybak.

A reflexively pro-Dem agenda “is a bias that’s reflected more in the national echelons,” Robson says. “We both know Steve Perry; he probably has as little use for Democrats as Republicans, that’s his reputation.”

That was Perry’s reputation.

My opinion:  when the Mindy got started in 2006 under original “editor” Robin Marty, it was amateurish but earnest.  It had journalistic ambitions, of sorts. 

When Perry took over, whether in spite of his presence or because of it, the paper’s tone became more shrill, more propagandistic; it read less like an earnest college newspaper staffed by newbies, and more like a dumb, trite, phoned-in, ill-informed, propagandistic leftyblog.

David Brauer covers the utterly unsurprising “story” at the slightly-less-overtly-bought-off MNPost; let’s see if my comment ever gets out of moderation.

Next to Michael Brodkorb, no center-right pundit in the Twin Cities generates more deranged irrationality than the Strib’s Katherine Kersten.

Lambert writes about one of her recent columns (doesn’t matter which; they all react the same no matter what she writes):

As we know, Ms. Kersten writes . . . in public . . . because Star Tribune management felt it was overdue for someone to counterbalance the pro-gladiatorial, pro-crotch shot, and pro-animal-like moan worldview of brutish males such as Doug Grow and Nick Coleman. But countering those two violence-drenched pornographers is a big, tough job. Do you have any idea how many Minnesotans are obsessed with gladiatorial stripper-pole moaning? A lot.

So I got to thinking: The Strib needs help. [Heh – Ed.] This is too much for one person. Which is where you come in. With the assistance of MSP Publishing’s marketing department—and this is real—we are offering a swank dinner for two—a $100 gift certificate to r. Norman’s—to whoever out there produces the best 500-word column that “Out Kerstens Kersten”. (E-mail your submission to blambert@mspmag.com).

Of course, Lamborghini (as G. Charles used to call him) is pilfing my material; it was in 2006-2007 that this blog started the “Columnist Parody” tradition in the local media with dare I say a brilliant assault on the oeuvre of Susan Lenfestey (poll and entries).

So in the interest of protecting my copyright, and because the Twin Cities’ pundosphere is such a rich vein of “talent”, it’s time to do another “Parody In The Dark” contest, where you, gentle reader, get to show the world the kind of “satire” Al Franken can’t even pull off.
The only real problem: picking who to parody.  The environment is, indeed, that target-rich.
So here’s what we’ll do:

1. Starting today, through Friday night, I’ll take nominations.
2. I’ll run a poll early next week to pick our victim
3. Once the subject is chosen, I’ll start the contest, probably next Tuesday; the objective will be to find the best parody of the selected writer.

The winner will receive some kind of reward. What, I don’t know; rest assured, it’ll pale compared to the pleasure you’ll bring millions.

As Charlie Quimby says:

Imitating clumsy writing is like purposely singing off-key. A professional will never be as convincing as the earnest and tone deaf amateur.

Amen, brother.

Bring on the tone-deafness!

(NOTE: Susan Lenfestey can not be nominated for this competition; she’s already “won” one).

Doug Grow – long known as the DFL’s number two shill in the mainstream media (second only to Lori Sturdevant) – is trying to blow some wind into the sails of the Elwin “E-Tink” Tinklenberg campaign.

E-Tink is trying to unseat Michele Bachmann in the Sixth Congressional District. He’s most “famous” in Minnesota for having been Jesse Ventura’s do-nothing Tranportation Commissioner. He should be even more famous for his ghoulish performance after the collapse of the I35W bridge, almost a year ago. As the fires still blazed and before the last girders had fallen into the water, Tinklenberg joined State Rep. Alice “The Phantom” Hausman on TV and radio coverage of the tragedy, claiming – before the National Transportation Safety Board investigators had shut off their pagers summoning them to Minneapolis – that the collapse was the result of Tim Pawlenty’s refusal to raise the gas tax. The performance was a ghoulish embarassment that would have ended the career of a politician…

…that was not a DFLer in a city where having paid lefty PR flaks like the MNPost and the Minnesoros “Independent” are almost redundant.

Anyway – Doug Grow writes in re the race:

A month ago, U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann said she’s on board with a campaign plan to get gasoline prices back to $2 a gallon…Do people in the 6th Congressional District buy this sort of campaign talk?

Well, if “they” don’t understand the laws of supply and demand, they can certainly get jobs as economics reporters for the Minnesoros “Indepdendent” perhaps they deserve to be getting their news from Doug Grow we can trade them all to Massachussetts?

I digress. Grow is doing what he’s done his whole career; spin, whilst carrying water for the DFL:

At this point, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has NOT put the 6th District in its “red to blue” category. Instead, it calls the district an “emerging” race for Democrats. The difference in categories is substantial: Democrats in “red to blue” districts receive financial and other resource help. Those in “emerging” districts receive pats on the back and encouraging words from the DCCC: “Go get ’em, buddy!”

But even if the DCCC isn’t convinced that Bachmann can be defeated after one term in Washington, Tinklenberg says he’s optimistic.

I’d actually pay money to hear some DFLer say “Oh, I’m going to get my donkey kicked. It’s hopeless. Smoke ’em if you got ’em”.

Of course, being a DFLer in Minnesota means never needing to come up with your own facile explanations:

Recall, Bachmann defeated Patty Wetterling by 8 percentage points, 50 to 42. BUT there was a third candidate in the race, John Binkowski, of the Independence Party, who picked up 7.8 percent of the vote. This time around, the IPs endorsed Tinklenberg.

When you add Wetterling’s 127,144 votes and Binkowski’s 23,557 votes, Bachmann won the district by just 548 votes.

Fascinating.

Except that Bachmann and Wetterling were running for an open seat – which is always much more up in the air.

And the national Democrat establishment did a lot more than pat Patty on the back; they poured truckloads of money into the race. The media, even more in the bag than usual for the DFLer, called in all its markers, assisted by a large, sometimes deranged pack of alternative media adjuncts. And for all that, Bachmann still not only won, but won by the biggest margin of victory of any Republican in the state, in a year where Republicans got trounced nationwide, with the most conservative message of any Republican in Minnesota.

This time around? She’s the incumbent. That’s worth a few points all by itself. The media has moved on to other races, doing its damnedest to get Al Franken elected. The DCCC knows a dead horse when it sees one. Her alt-media stalkers – having provided her (I am convinced) with at least one point of her margin of victory – have marginalized themselves into near-irrelevance; even some of the media figures that used to regard them with breathless credulity have gotten the message.

E-Tink; Dead Bid Walking.

Tonight’s the MDE/MNPublius bipartisan happy hour at Billy’s on Grand:

Hope to see you there.

———-

Speaking of graphics, I saw this in a post on Charlie Quimby’s blog the other day:

We’ll come back to that.

———-

Yesterday, I noted that among my favorite interviews on the NARN have been my discussions with Eric Black, Dane Smith and Minneapolis Mayor RT Rybak. I genuinely enjoy talking, and occasionally sparring, across the aisle. Two things can happen; either your beliefs get stronger from being tested in the exchange, or their weaknesses are exposed, perhaps leading to their changing. This happened to me twenty-five years ago; determined assault from conservative classmates showed me that my big-L Liberal beliefs were untenable. So I changed.

And this ties into what I wrote Monday – about how seeing those across the aisle from you as human makes for better, more satisfying argument. In a larger, more important sense, it’s also kinda important for running a country.

Of course, the flip side is also true; if you can keep your enemies firmly, securely dehumanized – from calling your opponents “wingnuts” or “commies”, up to presuming that the government you didn’t elect is depraved and evil enough to, say, spread AIDS in prisons or blow up the World Trade Center – it makes for an easy, more facile argument.

———-

It’s generally accepted as conventional wisdom that political discourse in this country has never been more foulmouthed, polarized and angry that it is today. That’s a bunch of liberal crap…

…er, wait. Heh heh. Dunno where that came from. Anyway – let me start over.

It’s ahistorical, to say the least. The 1828 campaign, which saw Andrew Jackson topple John Quincy Adams, was marred by violence, and represented a clash of social poles that spat venom across and unbridgeable gap; it was the original “blue vs. red” election; indeed, some of the media parallels between then and today are just too tempting.

Of course, at various times in the 1890’s and 1930’s, people were genuinely, and rightly, worried about the “discourse” adjourning to bayonet-point – which, in fact, it did in 1861.

That was an ugly, polarized debate.

Today? All we have is people taking broad, often factually-vacant shots at those with whom they disagree. Many of these shots are made possible by that sense of dehumanization we talked about on Monday. The “debate” – which, on blogs, is entirely one-sided, even if there’s a “comment section” involved – is fueled by the very real human pathologies that regard…

1. …”our side” as being where all the righteousness is, while “their side” is vacuous on a good day, evil on a bad one.
2. “Their” side being vacuous-to-evil, of course, anyone to practices it must by extension be vapid-to-rotten as well.
3. As long as you can keep your “enemy” nice and abstract and inhuman, there’s no real human consequence to ascribing his beliefs to base, loathsome motives.
4. This is reinforced by the tendency on blogs (especially, in the Twin Cities, among bloggers on the left, although it’s not exclusive) to write pseudonymously – so that not only are their targets too abstract to treat like humans, but they themselves are too abstract to be vulnerable to the very treatment they dish out.
5. Finally, resistance to the very notion that one should try to get past the abstract, dehumanizing influences of the medium.

At the bottom of it, of course, is this; it’s comfortable sitting in your echo chamber, smug ‘n happy with your preconceptions and your prejudices, bristling at the idea of approaching it any differently, because it’s just so much fun hanging out with your friends and bashing on the conveniently-abstract, abstractly-evil “enemy” among us.

It’s always been fun getting beyond that – for example, at the MOB parties I wrote about on Monday, or at Flash’s “Drinking Moderately” soirees.

Of course, liberals react oddly to the notion of going to a MOB party. And conservatives stopped getting invited to Flash’s gatherings about a year or so ago; rumor (not from Flash, by the way) had it the lefties didn’t like being seen with the enemy.

———-

Which brings us back to Charlie Quimby’s question: “Is it OK to meet unconditionally with anti-progressive GOP operatives?”

So many questions:

1. “Is it OK” according to what standard? Who set that standard? Why?
2. What are the consequences of meeting with the “operatives” if it’s not OK?
3. If it’s not “OK” to “meet with” Michael Brodkorb (over happy hour – the most innocuous and levelling institution Western Civilization has developed since the Polar Bear Run), what “conditions” would make it OK? Handcuffing all Republicans? What? Help me out here.
4. So if it is objectively proven that “progressivism” is actually intensively regressive, would that change the ground rules for this “Meeting?” (Trick question; it has been proven, albeit subjectively).
5. GOP Operative? So friggin’ what? A guy’s gotta have a job. And Michael does it well – indeed, he eats your party’s lunch so regularly that he’s become, if anything, a bigger source of derangement than Michele Bachmann and Katherine Kersten – two other conservatives that beat the local left like bongo drums, and have earned boundless hatred for it. And while I scratch my head at some of Brodkorb’s more gossipy revelations, after a while you have to look at his record – exposing Franken’s tax problems, which are on a whole ‘nother level than a squib Playboy interview – and realize the guy’s on the ball. Criminy, the way to learn to do things better is to have contact with those who do it better than you – and Brodkorb does it better than most of you. Grow up and cut the drama.
6. OK, let’s back out of the ideological swamp; if it’s not “OK” to “meet” (i.e. have a beer) with a “GOP operative” (and a room full of his friends, and yours as well), where do you stop? Should we not work together, too? (It’s not an academic question – the left actively purges “anti-progressive” thought in industries they control, like academia, education, unions, etc). Not worship together? Yep, you’re working on that. Not live in the same neighborhoods? At what point does contact – “meeting”, drinking, working, worshipping, studying, living – with those with whom you disagree, make you…unclean? Subject to dire consequences of “non-OK”-ness? Whatever you’re worried about?
7. Indeed – what in the hell are you worried about?

I’d expect that question from a lot of people before I’d expect it from Quimby. Yesterday, by way of pleading the sincerity with which he looks for conversation across the aisle, he elaborated:

Real community and real civility — civitas — come about when antagonists find something important they truly want in common. Something they cannot have without respecting the other’s perspective, values and rights.

Does anyone see the leaps series of hopscotch-like hops here?

Put aside your (plural) Brodkorb derangement for a moment here; does anyone seriously think that any of us on the right don’t seek a better country and society?

And before you answer “but conservative polices won’t lead to a better country and society”, just stop. In many ways, they do, and have – which is why all of us conservatives subscribe to it.

To ascribe it to other motives – that we’re idiots, that we’re tools of powerful interests that control our feeble little wingnut minds – is to buy into the “Dehumanizing” we talked about on Monday..

And liberalism has had its place (he says, clenching his teeth as he types) as well, and done the odd bit of good, by some definitions. Whew. That was tough.

More importantly – assuming there’s nothing worth talking about with liberals is just as dumb.

Quimby also asks:

Why would I or any progressive attend a branded event that seems calculated to create a veneer of bipartisanship for perhaps the most partisan attack blog in the state?

Dunno, Charlie. Why don’t you ask the MNPublius guys, among the few most respected “progressive” bloggers in the state.

If they can tough it out…

———-

For my part? Of course it’s “OK” to “meet” with “anti-liberty” “pro-speech-rationing, anti-growth, anti-market, pro-racist-gun-control” “operatives” over a couple of beers. For those with the intellectual horsepower to pull it off, it can be a fun challenge. For those who can take themselves and their beliefs a little less teeth-clenchingly seriously than normal, it can be fun to get out and mix it up with, or even just meet, other people. And as someone who not only “meets” with “operatives” across the aisle pretty regularly (and used to be one of them, for that matter), I’ll tell you something if you promise to keep it very quiet.

Ready?

(There are no consequences. It’s OK. It’s just casual contact with your fellow US citizen and, by the way, human. Nobody’s going to think the worse of you – assuming the left really doesn’t have some kind of purity police that show up at these things and takes names. They don’t exist – right?)

(And by the way, Michael Brodkorb doesn’t eat babies (just Democrats’ lunch) – he is, indeed, one of the nicer guys you’ll meet. Your face won’t peel off in divine retribution if you’re seen in the same room as him. Again, barring some kind of DFL purity police. We can bar that, can’t we?)

Shhhhhhh. Mum’s the word.

So I’ll hope to see you at Billy’s tonight. Hopefully the “consequences” are manageable.

The MDE/MNPublius bipartisan happy hour is coming up tomorrow at Billy’s:

Hope to see you there.

———-

Yesterday, I wrote about a party that an email discussion forum threw, which had some interesting results.

Once or twice a year for the past four years, we at the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers throw a party (stay tuned).

Now, the MOB tends to be center-right bloggers. It’s not entirely true – there are bloggers from around the spectrum, and some totally non-political bloggers as well on the MOBRoll. But for whatever reason, while the group has eschewed politics (indeed, tends to avoid politics at our parties completely), the membership is mostly center-right.

It’s not for lack of trying. Pinky swear.

Every time we throw a party I send more email invites to liberals than to conservatives, and I have the “sent” file to prove it. I send dozens of invites to local leftybloggers, media personalities, politicians of both parties.

Most don’t respond at all.

Some send “I gotta wash my hair”-caliber responses. I’m looking at you, Paul Demko.

A few, strangely, reacted with anger, writing bulgy-veined, teeth-clenched, splittle-o-licious rants about how conservatives were no fun. We’ll come back to them tomorrow.

And a few – Robin and Scott Steven Marty, Chuck Olson and (his girlfriend, whose name eludes me at the moment), Bob Collins (not a liberal pol, per se, but if you lay down with Keillor you’ll get up with snooty elitist fleas) and a few others actually bit the bullet and showed up. And we had a decent time. And – just like at the E-Democracy party I wrote about yesterday – it became just a tad harder to rip on them. Oh, their politics and policies and, eventually, employers were still a parade of material. But they weren’t just a bunch of facile labels anymore. There was a human behind the labels.

My neighbor Flash, who writes Centrisity, did something similar. For a couple of summers, he graciously hosted “Drinking Moderately” – a play on “Drinking Liberally” (which is a national chain of events where liberals gather where they’re told to drink and talk politics) – where he’d invite conservative, liberal, and who-gives-a-crap bloggers to his garage and his always-open kegerator to talk…

…whatever.

And, just like the MOB parties, it was a good time. Largely because there was free beer (thanks, Flash!)…

…but also because I got to meet the likes of Chris Dykstra and the MNPublius guys and – are we detecting a pattern here? – see that they were actual people, as opposed to labels. And, I’d like to think, vice versa.

Oh, it didn’t always work. There were a few attendees who remained bloated, irascible jagoffs and/or mirthless, spiteful harpies, and it showed. But as a rule, the experiment was a pretty cool one. Retroactive kudos to Flash.

———-

I’ve taken to enjoying this sort of exchange – when it works, anway. It can be interesting, talking with “the enemy” and, once in a while, listening to see what you can learn.

I actively seek this sort of engagement – partly because I’m a curious guy, partly because I love a good debate. A few months back, I sent a bunch of invites to appear on the NARN to a bunch of local DFL politicians. Of course, I’d be lying if I didn’t acknowledge that I knew most of them wouldn’t respond – more on that tomorrow. And the prime motivator, naturally, was to highlight Andy Birkey’s ridiculous double standard, calling out Michele Bachmann for avoiding liberal media so many area liberal pols are utter cowards at facing polite but probing dissent.

Still, it’s a fact – our interviews with Eric Black, Dane Smith and RT Rybak are among my favorite episodes of the NARN show. Not that anyone convinced anyone, but have some discord in one another’s echo chambers can be good for the brain, once in a while.

On occasion, I also like appearing on Radio Free Nation, a BlogTalkRadio show hosted by Saint Paul’s Marty Owings. I’m the token conservative, normally, going at it with a couple of liberals, black activists, a couple of Ronulans, and the odd “anarchist”. And I learn things.

Of course, some of those “things” are “people are weird”, but in fact it can be interesting, getting outside ones own political safe zone, if only because the stretching and pulling makes your own beliefs stronger (or, alternately, changes them. Which is how I became a conservative in the first place).

But not everyone sees it that way. To some, that idea is a threat.

More on that tomorrow.

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism from 11AM-5PM:

• Volume I “The First Team” – Chad and Brian and John kick things off from 11-1.
• Volume II “The Headliner” – Ed and I will take over from 1-3. There’s a safe bet that I’ll be pretty fired up about Heller. Plus Eric Black and his advice for John McCain.
• Volume III, “The Final Word” – King and Michael will be dishing the Minnesota smack from 3-5.

So tune in to all six hours of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Twin Cities’ media’s sole guardians of sanity. On the air at AM1280 in the Metro, or streaming at AM1280’s Website, or via podcast at Townhall.

And don’t forget the David Strom Show, with David Strom and Margaret Martin and the bird-friendly Prius, from 9-11!

I was going to write about this bit here – about local gay Catholic groups complaining about Archbishop Nienstedt’s cracking down on LGBT services at a liberal local parish.

Brian “Saint Paul” Ward, however, beat me to it with a huge headstart pointing out correctly that…:

To put it in terms a journalism school graduate might appreciate, the Catholic Church not hosting a Gay Pride event is dog bites man. It happens every day.

Now, a Catholic parish hosting these events, as apparently St. Joan of Arc in Minneapolis has been doing so for the past several years, is man bites dog (i.e., an unusual, infrequent event more likely to be reported as news than an ordinary, everyday occurrence).

Reasonably speaking, that is what should have been covered the past few years. Maybe some shock headlines, “Catholic Parish Hosting Gay Pride Event” followed by quotes from founders of obscure pressure groups for traditional values accusing the organizers of spiritual violence and Christophobic hatred.

Of course, the local agenda-media coverage – Grow at the MNPost, Andy Birkey in the Minnesoros Monitor “Independent” – took the “man biting dog” angle with dreary predictability and impeccable punctuality.

…the most thoroughly dishonest portrayal comes from the new media. Here are excerpts from Doug Grow at the website MinnPost.

Remember when it was OK for Catholics to pray with gays and lesbians?

Be careful whom you pray for…Apparently with a straight face, McGrath said that this isn’t some new crackdown because Archbishop John Nienstedt is now in charge. Recently retired Archibishop Harry Flynn would have cracked down on this, too, had he known of it, McGrath said. Maybe…Many are saddened and angry ? but probably not surprised.

There’s got to be an award for reporting this awful. (A Pulitzer maybe?) Of course, this dispute has absolutely nothing to do with who you pray with or who you pray for. The Church encourages gay activists to attend Mass (sans sacraments, as with anyone in a state of mortal sin) and practically requires Catholics to pray for all those in mortal sin. At his age and experience, Grow should know this. In fact, comments testifying to these facts were in the article he linked to. But he ignores that, misrepresents the issue entirely, questions the integrity of the Church spokesman, and casts his favored actors as oppressed victims. Not bad for a couple of paragraph’s work.

The big question:  When did Doug Grow turn into Nick Coleman?

Grow is a former columnist for the Star Tribune. The only silver lining here is realizing he’s now at an online liberal ghetto like MinnPost, instead of working the monopoly newspaper in town. His ability to confuse the issue and demonize his political enemies in the public’s imagination is now severely limited. Let’s be thankful for small favors.

Andy Birkey?  This is your future!

McCain came to town.

I didn’t have an invite.

But reading the leftymedia’s contortions on the subject is probably almost as much fun anyway. It ranged, as usual, from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Or at least from the groaningly obvious and cliche-driven to the moderately interesting.

For the former, we turn to former City Pages writer GR Anderson at the MNPost – who uncovered a real scoop:

Shocker! McCain’s visit to bring out the wealthy, protestors

GOP presidential candidate John McCain’s visit to the Hilton in downtown Minneapolis for a fundraiser this afternoon promises to be a moneyed affair: To qualify to be on the host committee, McCain’s web site says, “individuals or couples must raise or contribute $20,000.” For the less fortunate, “tickets for the Photo Opportunity & Dinner are $2,300 per person. Tickets for the Main Reception and Dinner are $1,000 per person.”

Right. As opposed to those Democrat fundraiser$, where $your $pocket $change will get you in?

Who says the economy is bad?

(I don’t have an exhaustive list, but I do know that the MNPost and the Minnesoros Independent will be calling it “Bad” until 18 months after the recovery is generally accepted as undeniable, or Barack Obama’s inauguration, whichever comes first. But I digress).

Seriously – does GR Anderson think that big-buck fundraisers are a Republican franchise?

Eric Black’s article was more interesting – or at least a little less predictable:

Senator McCain. Welcome to Minnesota. Thank you for your service. My question is about the occupation of Iraq.

I agree that some Democrats have tried to have a little too much fun with your “100 years in Iraq” quote a while back. I take you at your word that you didn’t mean 100 more years resembling the last five — 100 years of steady U.S. casualties. In explaining what you really meant, you have said that it would be fine with you if U.S. troops had a long-term presence in Iraq, like the troops have had in Germany, Japan and Korea.

Well, we’re off to a good start. That’s more honest than most of Black’s colleagues have been with that question.

Many Americans may think that sounds fine. I’m not so sure. No other country has huge military installations around the world.

But that’s a fairly recent development – not so long ago, plenty of other countries maintained genuine empires; Britain, France, Spain, Portugal and even Belgium had or have imperial possessions within my lifetime and, incidentally, Eric Black’s.

It’s not only expensive, but it smacks of imperialism.

Let’s touch on both of those assertions.

It “smacks” of imperialism, because it is – sort of – and always has been. And yet unlike every single other imperial power in history, our “imperialism” has left behind largely functional, largely democratic countries; Germany, Japan and South Korea are world leaders and, at least by their previous standards, incredibly liberal in that small-“l” way that even I approve of.

And the “expense” has to be based on costs and benefits – indeed, Black touches on that concept later, so we’ll come back to it. The “expense” of any “imperial” entanglement has to be judged against the benefits; the Cold War, for example, has to be gauged against the general good of having contained the Soviets until they collapsed.

Ask yourself how the U.S. — specifically the McCain administration — would view it if another powerful country — let’s say China for the sake of illustration — toppled the government of our neighbors — let’s say Mexico, and said that one of its goals was to leave behind a Mexican government that would be an ally of China. Let’s say China did install a Mexican government friendly to China and then reached a deal with its puppet government for a permanent military base close to our borders in order to protect what China declared to be its “vital interests” in the Americas. And then let’s say China announced that it would be fine if the bases were there for 100 years. My hunch is, the McCain administration wouldn’t like it, wouldn’t tolerate it, would view it as a threat and an act of aggression against the United States and a statement of China’s intent to dominate our hemisphere. Please correct me if I’m wrong about that.

Black is right – sort of. The Monroe Doctrine has pretty much been established policy, one we’ve enforced for almost 200 years.

Of course, the analogy makes Iran – a murderous dictatorship that has been in a de facto state of war with us for my entire adult lifetime – the moral equal of the United States.  Is that a dock  you wanna walk down, Eric Black?

There is, of course, another difference; China has not secured UN resolutions condemning our human rights abuses, our acts of war against China and their allies, our pursuit of Weapons of Mass Destruction and our defiance of previous agreements caused by our previous aggression.  We don’t pose a threat to China and the rest of the world.

The parallel, Mr. Black, really isn’t there.

And I know – your analogy doesn’t depend on the parallel, necessarily. But let’s just say that some of Mr. Black’s audience doesn’t know this.

Of course, the USA is not just any country. We are the world’s only superpower. How we use that position is essential to how the rest of the world views us as we try to repair some of the damage that President Bush — and the Iraq misadventure — have done to the our image in the world.

Actually, Mr. Black, Iraq has very little to do with the world’s “elites'” views of us. There’s another entire post brewing on that subject – but suffice to say that Europe’s opinion-class have never much cared for us (except when we’ve saved them from, say, Hitler or post-war starvation) and they never really will. The left’s conceit that Europeans will generally love the US once this “misadventure” is over are, at best, wishful thinking and utterly ahistorical.

I know I’m making more assertions than posing questions here, but the question is: If, as you hope, U.S. troops will be in Iraq for 100 years, what will that do to the perception that the U.S. seeks to dominate Middle East?

A “perception” that the left and media (pardon the redundancy) are trying to reinforce in every reference to the subject?

Your reference to the long-term U.S. troop presence in Germany, Japan and Korea is designed to illustrate that U.S. troops can be present in foreign bases without facing daily combat or casualties. My question is: How soon and at what cost in blood and treasure do you believe that the situation in Iraq — specifically the situation regarding the safety and normalcy of U.S. troops in Iraq — will resemble the situations in Germany, Japan and Korea?

I can answer that for Sen. McCain; “when the sentient terrorists realize that their chances of achieving their goals aren’t worth their lives”.

And Germany, Japan and Korea are bad examples (although to a nation of people who are largely ignorant of history, they may be the best we can do). The Philippines and El Salvador are better ones; insurgencies that died off (literally and metaphorically) as the result of an extended, judicious combination of military and civil action. It took six years for the Philippines’ insurgency to tail off a century ago; El Salvador is fairly recent history. Neither accomplishment was achieved without pain; both had the good luck to be either too early or too obscure for the attentions of the modern-day American media.

It’s wonderful that the level of violence in Iraq has fallen over recent months. But more than 200 U.S. troops, and a much larger number of Iraqis, have been killed in the less than half-year of 2008 so far.

Context counts, though. The number has been falling for a year, is at its lowest level of the war so far, and seems for the moment to be continuing to fall. Everyone from Petraeus to Michael Yon says to expect a counterattack to try to influence the election, and that’s reasonable. But if the violence continues to drop, the Iraqi government continues to improve (I notice you haven’t written, Mr. Black, about the fact that the Maliki government has quietly achieved most of the 18 criteria for recognizing Iraq as a legitimate government that the Dems were howling about last year), as Al Quaeda continues to be killed off (again, the MNPost is silent), it seems reasonable to believe things will tail off over the course of years rather than decades.

I hope, as you do, that the number continues to drop and soon gets close to zero. I assume we agree that the reasons for the decline in violence are several and complex and, as Gen. Petraeus said, “fragile” and “reversible.” Do you agree, “fragile” and “reversible?”

I agree with the General that it’s best not to be overconfident – but that while the fragility is a function of a difficult Iraqi situation, the progress will “reverse” only because of decisions made in Washington DC.

I suspect we may disagree, but I believe that there is no likely benefit to ordinary Americans of the invasion and occupation of Iraq that will outweigh the costs already incurred.

Those costs are already incurred and we can’t get them back. But decisions about war, including the future policy in Iraq, cannot and should not be shielded from the logic of cost/benefit analysis.

OK.  Let’s look those costs and benefits over:

Costs:  4,000-odd dead American troops, hundreds of billions of dollars.  (I’m not going to count “international goodwill”, becuase for the most part that is mercurial and cultural and if it hadn’t tanked over the Iraq war, it would have over soccer rules or trade balance or Susan Lucci’s Daytime Emmy or whatever they Euros are always whinging about whenever we’re not disposing of their genocidal dictators for them).

Benefits: Iran is firmly counterbalanced.  In a few years, the countries of the Middle East will very likely have a safe, stable neighbor against whom the people can find their own dictatorships and medieval baronies sorely wanting.  We have a base to contest Iran’s control of – I stress this – two thirds of the world’s currently-working oil reserves, which may be of much more importance to the third world and developing nations like China and India than to us.  Absent a serious US presence and counterbalance on the ground, Iran could close the Straits of Hormuz more or less at will (indeed, has been building for a decade and a half a force capable to doing that, with North Korean and Chinese anti-ship missiles and Russian submarines), with terrible effects on the US economy and potentially cataclysmic effects on the developing world.

You can, of course, easily reply that there are never any guarantees in war except that it will be bloody and awful. I agree. It’s one reason we should not get into unnecessary wars. But seriously, given the entire regional and historical context in which Iraq sits, what is your level of confidence — and how can you convince skeptical listeners to share your confidence — that the situation of U.S. troops in Iraq will resemble the situation in Germany within 20 years? Or, I don’t know, why not make it 100?

That’s easy.  There’s a zero percent chance that Iraq will ever resemble any of those countries.  Unlike Germany, its two primary religious factions are still in a low-level war (as opposed to “500 years ago”).  Unlike Japan and Korea, Iraq is ethically as well as religiously heterodox.  Unlike Germany and Japan, there was no clean, legal end to a conventional war, after which the people of both countries pretty much toed the occupier’s line. 

What we can hope for, and have worked for, is that Iraq will turn into the best Iraq it can be.

So I called this “Question for Eric Black”, didn’t I?  Here’s the question, then:  Given continued improvement on the ground, and assuming that over the course of the next year or two the insurgency dies off to a fairly background-level problem, and that the US involvement starts to draw down (as Gen. Petraeus has said) to a small garrison of mostly civil affairs and special forces troops over the course of the next 2-5 years, what do you think Iraq is most likely to turn into.  What do you think, given the above (and the above seems not all that unreasonable these days), are the best, worst and most likely cases for Iraqi civil society over the next decade or two?

Take it away.

Doug Grow in the MinnPest does an endzone happy dance over the kickoff of Minneapolis City Hall’s new, hideously expensive, purely symbolic “Green Roof”:

Workers will begin tossing dirt on conservative talk radio skeptics and 5,000 square feet of roof at the Minneapolis City Hall Saturday.

Just a hunchy, Duggles, but I don’t think the last dirt’s been tossed on this issue.

We’re gonna keep this one on the radar for a loooooong time.

(more…)

G. R. Anderson – a writer who apparently spent his career at the City Pages rehearsing to be the next Doug Grow, building a career on soft-core DFL flakkery – gushes about MN Senator and and DFL hatchetwoman Tarryl Clark.

Did I say gush?  Yes, I did – like three times.

Well…?

Mid-session Fridays are sometimes a ho-hum affair at the Capitol. But media conferences are held on that day to review the past week and preview the week ahead, something the DFL caucus often does by putting Tarryl Clark in front of reporters.

One Friday morning last month, Clark, a state senator from St. Cloud, readied to meet the press before a polished wood conference table in a hearing room. The media savvy Clark always banters with the assembled scribes, talking heads and camera jockeys before getting down to official proceedings. (She’s also normally dressed in some shade of blue.)

Note to Mr. Anderson; I’m told she also likes walks in the rain and hates shallow people.

On this day, murmurs around the Capitol were that Gov. Tim Pawlenty had hopped a flight out of town, presumably to Washington, D.C.

Clark, who possesses a sharp tongue and tenacity, rarely misses a chance to take a loyal oppositional swipe at the governor, and she uttered something about a “super-secret” trip by  Pawlenty in a tone that suggested a wink and a nod: Surely you guys will report on this, right?

Surely he will.  In a reporters notebook festooned with scribbles; “G. R. Clark.  Mr. G.R. Clark.  Mister G.R. Clark”.

A cynic might see a ploy here — a leader of the less-than-moderate Minnesota DFL Party trying to position herself as a moderate who can work both sides of the aisle, unite Minnesotans, yadda, yadda, yadda … But Clark appears sincere.

Maybe a few hearts doodled around the margins.

King Banaian is a little less lovestruck over Senator Clark:

MinnPostToasties runs a long, gushing review of Sen. Tarryl Clark, repeatedly bringing up “she could be governor”. It does its best to portray her as moderate; I’ve heard her “my daddy was a Republican” pitch before. Those of us familar with her views on taxes, what bills we try to pass in response to a bridge collapse, stadium taxation without referendum, or denying access to a business development tool preferred by businesses in her own district, might not be as in awe of Clark as the Post is.

Let’s go back to that “I started out as a Republican” pitch. Anderson:

“I grew in a Republican family, and I voted Republican when I first started voting,” Clark admits, saying that she was hewing to her family members’ core beliefs.

I’d like to know, of course, what Senator Clark thinks that means – or, more importantly, what it’s supposed to mean to voters.

After all, I used to be a liberal!  What did I take from it?  (It’s fodder for another discussion).

What did Clark take from her alleged Republican background (bearing in mind we’re talking about pre-Quist, pre-Reagan Minnesota Republicans, which is to say “DFLers with better suits”?

“They’re pretty moderate. They believe that it’s important to make investments, but they didn’t like the idea of government being in people’s lives, local control, values I still hold.

Of course, the “value” is expressed by equating “Local Government Assistance” (or, as King notes, “ …on taxes, what bills we try to pass in response to a bridge collapse, stadium taxation without referendum, or denying access to a business development tool preferred by businesses in her own district” with “control”; the comparison works in the same way as “Freedom is slavery” works.

Things I don’t necessarily see the Republican Party doing.”

The biggest failing of the MNGOP in the past two years is that it has so abdicated its role as defender of smaller, more local government that Tarryl Clark can say this without getting hooted off the stage by any objective observer.

Well, not G.R. Anderson.  He’s back in his room, building a photo collage.

Reporters nibbled a bit on Pawlenty’s absence from St. Paul, and Clark was happy to offer some red meat. “The governor’s focus may be a stumbling block,” she said at one point. “Depends on whether he’s here or not.” And, later: “If his words were a bridge, I’d be afraid to cross it.”

Her words were wry, with no hint of anger. And they had the effect of painting Pawlenty as, like Clark often puts it, an “absentee governor.”

At the end, one rumor that was hanging in the air finally came as a question: Have you thought about running for governor?

Al Franken sacks his old “campaign manager”, brings in a new one.

What a difference a change in perspective makes: with the news, Roosh…:

Franken brings on new campaign chief, Minn. native has experience unseating incumbents

I don’t care if she can make Monkeys come out of Franken’s [rear exit]. Franken’s issue is his own dumbassness.

Brodkorb:

Hamline political science professor David Schultz is hardly more kind in assessing the state of the Franken campaign. ‘Is this the classic putting lipstick on a pig?’ he asks. ‘Does Franken have fundamentally bigger problems that changing campaign managers won’t solve?’

Schultz is struck by the static nature of the polls in recent weeks. ‘Unless the Franken campaign can get a bunch of people to rethink Coleman and therefore rethink Franken the race is over.’”

And finally, Doug Grow – for non-Twin-Citians, that means “the most in-the-bag member of the in-the-bagosphere”. I add emphasis:

The Franken for Senate campaign became a little more traditional today with the announcement that Stephanie Schriock will become campaign manager in early June. To date, Franken’s campaign has not had a single person with the title of campaign manager…Franken campaign officials say the hiring of Schriock doesn’t signal any major changes in the organization but is a traditional step in preparing for the race against incumbent Norm Coleman. The hiring apparently assumes that Franken will win endorsement at the DFL convention, which is to be held June 6-8. — Doug Grow

So yesterday I read Doug Grow for the first time since he left the Strib.  It was a review of P.J. O’Rourke’s speech at the Northrup.  And since it’s the first thing I’ve read from Grow now that he’s working for an overtly-political “news” outlet (The MNPost), I have to ask…

…is he doing anything different?

The Minnesota Monitor – which pretty routinely reprints talking points from left-of-center groups – is trying to gin up a phony controversy over Katherine Kersten’s columns about the Tarek Ibn Ziad Academy and the Saint Thomas University censorship of conservative student groups.

Well, nothing new there. In the entire Twin Cities media, nobody elicits more derangement than Kersten because, in a market full of full-bore liberals passing themselves off as “apolitical” and “moderate”, she’s the only “out” conservative.

She draws particular attack for having been associated with the center-right “Center of the American Experiment”, the local conservative think tank which, along with the Taxpayers League and Jason Lewis, was a prime mover behind Minnesota’s pesky outbreak of conservatism over the past decade. As such, all three (and the symptoms of that outbreak – talk radio, Michele Bachmann, EdWatch, Powerline and so on) are ripe for attack using the best tools the leftymedia have; ad-homina, harassment, and petty niggling.

Background: in this piece, the Monitor’s Andy Birkey notes that Kersten uses some themes from conservative group press releases and from Powerline.

(Yes, that’s the same Andy Birkey who’s written pieces that would seem to borrow slavishly from Dump Bachmann, Citizens for a Supine “Safer” Minnesota, the RNC Welcoming Committee, the DNC, anyone that bashes Christian colleges without a whole lot of context…)

Paul Schmelzer followed up with Strib management:

I left messages with editor Nancy Barnes and Politics Team Leader Doug Tice, Kersten’s direct supervisor, but it was Tice — a former contributor to the quarterly publication of the Center for the American Experiment, the thinktank Kersten served as director for — who called me back.

Schmelzer takes the obligatory dig at Tice’s “connection” with Kersten’s former employer – omitting plenty of key context. Doug Tice, during his stint at the Pioneer Press, before being hired at the Strib, was a very subtly conservative columnist – indeed, the last one with a Twin Cities paper before Katherine Kersten. He wrote a great column, although he was no ideologue – think of him as Craig Westover without the statements and with the questions. That ended in (if memory serves) 2002.

The Strib doesn’t post Tice’s email address (not that I could find online, anyway), so I can’t confirm my belief that Tice’s “contributions” were, essentially, re-used columns. I’ll try to follow up on that. I could be wrong – but if I’m not, it’d be a fairly key bit of context to omit; leaving it out could leave the reader with some wrong ideas.

In our first conversation, Tice said he was unaware of the YAF press release and asked for some time to compare it with Kersten’s column. In a followup call, he replied, “I’m not finding anything here to be particularly concerned about,” adding that he’s satisfied with the legwork Kersten did on the piece: getting a statement of explanation from UST, interviewing Parker, adding in an anecdote about another liberal allowed to speak on campus, etc. “My sense is she added fairly significantly to the discussion.”

Tice also doesn’t buy the argument that Kersten regurgitates what rightwing blogs have to say. “I would disagree that that describes Katherine’s work in a general way,” he said. “In a good many occasions she has broken new ground on things, most recently with the charter school [majority Muslim school TIZA]. Are there times when she is weighing in on issues and turns to sources from a conservative perspective? Sure. I don’t think that’s unique to her.”

The assertion that Kersten “regurgitates what right wing blogs say” is perhaps the weirdest of the Monitor’s assertions. Leaving aside the laundry list of lefty talking that the Monitor has been caught reprinting, or the fact that the Monitor exists to serve as nothing but a bought-and-paid-for propaganda organ in the first place; let’s ask this – Kersten is a conservative writer that lives in a market where the other well-known conservative writers are conservative bloggers! Why should Kersten not give to and borrow from them?

Is there a reason? Beyond the Twin Cities’ mainstream media’s shared Kersten Derangement Syndrome, anyway?

He continued, “One of the reasons we value Katherine at the paper is that she brings that perspective from another side of the spectrum that’s not always heard in the mainstream press.” But if Kersten’s columns cover the same ground — sometimes with startling similarity — as bloggers like Power Line or conservative groups like YAF, how is that an alternative to what’s already out there?

If by “out there” Schmelzer implies that the Twin Cities’ mainstream media and center right blogosphere have a whole lot in common, I’d like a shot of whatever he’s drinking.

“No criticism intended, but I’m not sure Nick Coleman raises altogether different opinions than what’s already out there in the blogosphere,” he said. “She provides this point of view on our pages.”

And there’s – to coin a phrase – the big question: why is the Monitor flapping its gums about the “connection” between Kersten and Powerline?

Because there’s a genuine journalistic concern?

Or because for half a decade, the Twin Cities blogosphere has been pointing out that Lori Sturdevant has been slavisly echoing the DFL’s legislative leadership’s agenda in her weekly column? That Doug Grow spent decades carrying water for the DFL? That Nick Coleman magically turns up whenever some lefty pressure group wants to hold a “Die-in” or needs someone to bellow “our schools are burning” on cue?

Because the leftymedia needs a red herring to draw the readers’ attention away from that truckload of rotting carp that Powerline, Ed, the Fraters, Hugh, Anti-Strib, KAR, the Dogs, True North, David and Margaret, Fishsticks, Bogus Doug and a hundred other conservative bloggers have been piling on the doorstep at 425 Portland (and whatever coffee shop the Monitor meets at) for half a decade now?