Via Paul Demko at the Mindy: Michael Kinsley wants all of you mindless proles to quit getting uppity, to shut up and do what your superiors tell you.

The funny part? Kinsley basically cribs Alec Baldwin’s “argument”; “Coleman’s a Republican! Franken is cool! Trust us!”

Demko:

Washington Post columnist Michael Kinsley scrutinizes Minnesota’s Senate race today. He chastises voters for getting hung up on Al Franken’s past jokes…

Oh, really, Michael F*****g Kinsley?

Sorry, sirrah, but by your leave I’ll make up my own mind.

And, for what little it’s worth (coming from a mere non-patrician and all), it really has little to do with his jokes – but rather…:

…rather than focusing on legitimate campaign issues:

…yes. Those. Franken has, improbably, fewer positions on these than even Barack Obama.

This year a professional jokester, Al Franken (D), is challenging a professional politician, incumbent Norm Coleman (R), for a Senate seat in Minnesota.

But – again, by your leave, Mr. Kinsley, since I’m one of the mere citizens you deign in your infinite wisdom to scold – we Minnesotans have a bit of a track record with politicians whose only claim to fame is…well, fame. “We” – or at least our moron cousins from Hinkley – elected a governor whose track record was close enough to Franken’s for county work; he was famous mainly for being famous. A celebrity. Actually, Ventura had more political experience than Franken; he’d been the mayor of Brooklyn Center (or Brooklyn Park? I mix ’em up – although to be fair, so did Ventura).

And he spent four years in office as a loud, abrasive mouthpiece for Dean Barkley and Tim Penny, and a de facto DFLer.

And Franken will be no different; “polemicist” pretty much sums up his political resume. He will be no less a sock puppet than Jesse Ventura was.

Not every joke Franken wrote or told over a third of a century in the joke business was hilarious, okay? Minnesota voters will have to decide whether their dislike of professional politicians trumps their enjoyment in taking umbrage, or vice versa.

Kinsley? Bubbie? Thanks for assuming us mere Schlitz-drinking, NASCAR-watching, bible-clinging rubes are obsessed over, ahem, the most understandable part of Franken’s personality.

Doy.

I’ll grant you every word of that – and Franken still has not one single recommendation.

Coleman is a man of no interest, a run-of-the-mill professional politician who started out as a standard issue long-haired student rebel leader on Long Island in the 1960s and surfed the zeitgeist until now.

So like Alec Baldwin, we have the ad-hominem…

Today he is a standard-issue pro-war tax-cut Republican.

…the slur on Republican policy (have you, Lord Kinsley, ever called a Democrat “standard-issue”?), and…

…what?

Franken, by contrast, needs no introduction and from Day One would be one of the most interesting people in the Senate.

Ah.

“Interesting”.

If you say so, Lord Kinsley.

An “interesting” person who raises taxes, jacks up fuel prices (by omission), stifles nuclear energy, appeases terrorists and foments destructive isolationism, coddles the UN, supports speech rationing, gun control, activist judges and the “Fairness” Doctrine, to this survivor of the Carter era, not very interesting at all.

Demko:

Kinsley further points out that any comedian who hadn’t ginned up some risible material over the years wouldn’t last very long in the profession. There’s a fine line, after all, between making people laugh and causing them to squeam.

“If the voters of Minnesota would rather be represented by a hack like Norm Coleman than laugh off a few jokes that didn’t work, then they should stop complaining about being stuck with professional politicians,” Kinsley concludes. “And the real joke will be on them.”

So to you, my liege – if you would deign to entertain a question from a rude fyrd – I ask “what would be an affirmative policy reason to vote for Franken, rather than against Coleman?

“He’s a funny guy” is not a policy reason.

Pardon the impertinence, Lord F*****g Kinsley.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 at 6:32 am and is filed under Campaign '08, Minnesota Politics, Progressive Tyranny. 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.