We’ll accept it as a given that nobody in the Twin Cities media excites more deranged, dissociative ranting than Katherine Kersten.

There’s really no arguing the point. Let’s move along with the premise.

Yesterday, Kersten took a tongue-in-cheek swat at perhaps the dumbest thing I’ve read in my life; a petition to have her removed.

And reading the petition is enough to make you both howl with laughter and pray for a driving rain of Zoloft to descend on the city; yes, Twin Citians, your fellow citizens are that stupid, and their votes do count just as much as yours.

Note to Kersten’s many dim-bulb critics; a columnist is a very different thing than a reporter. That’s why Nick Coleman can say things like “our schools are burning” without actually having to show evidence of a school belching smoke and flame.

Oh, and the dissociation isn’t just the deranged hoi-polloi of the febrile lefty-in-the-street; Paul Schmelzer, the Minnesoros Monitor’s occasionally-capable writer, who notes:

One signatory of the petition might lend more credence to that criticism than most: the Pioneer Press’ David Hanners, who won a Pulitzer Prize for the Dallas Morning News in 1989, was the eighth to sign.

Which is something of an appeal to false authority on the one hand – so what if he won a Pulitzer? It doesn’t mean he’s not an agenda-driven (and indeed as you continue through Schmelzer’s piece, he is; he’s a Moslem, and he’s irate over the TIZA school flap from a while ago; while I’m not placed to judge the accuracy of the complaints, I’m buggered to think of any other examples of the Monitor according religious faith any status in complaining about media coverage).

Indeed – given that Mindy Greiling’s op-ed detailing Kersten’s supposed inaccuracies has been pretty roundly savaged, one has to ask – what has Kersten supposedly gotten wrong?

Sigh.

At any rate, the “good” news is that now, 2,000 years of western civilization and 232 years of American democracy have reached their zenith with…

…the online Petition-o-matic site.

Ryan Rhodes has given it a test drive, and has started a demand to toss Nick Coleman for actual crimes against truth vastly worse than those of which Kersten is wrongly accused.

Please – circulate it, and sign it.

And for my part, I’ve started one of my own.

Do it for the children!

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 6:30 am and is filed under Media, Stupid. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.