Let’s take a trip back through the history of Nick Coleman.

In 2004, to impugn Governor Pawlenty’s budget-cutting platform, he paid a potemkin visit to an inner city school (one where my daughter had attended kindergarten) and bellowed “YOUR SCHOOLS ARE BURNING” – as if the academic and social failure, financial wastrelcy and generalized collapse of public schools were something that only happened under Republican governors who twiddled with the budget (and hardly touched education funding).  It was a fairly bald-faced swat at the governor and the state’s thin film of fiscal conservatives.

And, of course, it was wrong.  Theatrical, and wrong.

Later still in 2004, when Coleman tried to tie the idea that people had to go all the way to Minneapolis for free flu shots to Pawlenty:

“It was time to leave the PROFESSIONAL BUILDING. I wished everyone good health and walked out onto Hennepin Avenue. When I looked down the street and squinted, I could almost see Lakewood Cemetery, four blocks away. The gates were open.”

In 2007, Nick Coleman – bailing desperately as his effort to tie the 35W Bridge disaster to budget-cutting slipped beneath the waves – reacted badly to news that engineers were about to tie the collapse to an unfortunate but fairly mundane and utterly non-political material failure; “get ready to be gusseted”, he snorted, like a third-rate illusionist hoping to push back the laws of physics by the sheer force of his rhetoric.

So are we starting to see a pattern?

After seven years of success at taming the state budget monster and running a state that just plain runs better than most of the rest of the country – especially better than the liberal cesspools that Coleman seems to admire so much – Pawlenty is spending the legislative off-season pre-campaigning for President.  And that means knocking around the country.

And just like the burning schools and magic cemetary gates and flying gusset plates, Coleman’s going to try to twist it into some sort of malfeasance.

Because for some reason, Coleman thinks Pawlenty has left something undone back home:

It’s called Minnesota, and although Pawlenty can find 49 other states, he’s having trouble feeling his way around his home state. For good reason: Minnesota’s problems could trip up his ambitions. As Pawlenty travels the Republican rubber chicken circuit, Minnesota is heading into uncharted waters.

And its governor is AWOL.

Minnesota’s “uncharted waters” are these: things are tough, but better than in most of the country.  We have a nasty budget situation – but at least the Governor balanced it (over the DFL’s politically dead body).

But to Coleman, it’s not about substance or those pesky numbers.  It’s about appearances – in this case, appearing to take the yapping schnauzers of his opposition seriously [emphasis added by me]:

Pawlenty’s refusal to participate in a legislative summit designed to stave off looming fiscal disaster was nothing less than nonfeasance. Instead of doing his job at the Capitol last week, Pawlenty attended a shmoozefest in Eden Prairie, surrounded by business leaders and loyalists (not to mention his adoring staff). In shirking his duty, he broke faith with voters and broke bonds with the legacy of his party.

This may be the most perfectly, inscrutably dumb paragraph Coleman has ever written.  I have literally spent five minutes trying to encapsulate the torrent of dumb and wrong; the best I can come up with is a list:

1. The “legislative summit” is a do-nothing charade being thrown by his incompetent, spendthrift opposition to try to make them look like they’re marginally less useless than they are.
2. Er, Nick?  Wasn’t the premise that the Governor was galavanting around the country and couldn’t find his way around Minnesota?  You do know that Eden Prairie is in Minnesota, right?
3. “Nonfeasance” is not a word.
4. Not to be pedantic, but neither is “Shmoozefest”.  It’s “Schmoozefest”.
5. It seems a bit of an abuse of rhetorical license to say that Pawlenty’s staff “adores” him; worse still to say it as if it’s a bad thing.  Perhaps Coleman’s experiences at the Strib newsroom have programmed him to think colleagues should hate each other?

It gets worse:

The Capitol event drew dozens of former state government leaders,

[I’m wondering; I know who elects “government leaders”, but I am trying to think who elects or selects “former government leaders?”  What is their significance?  Why would we care what they think?  Get back to me on that…]

including a bevy of mainstream Minnesota Republicans such as former governors Al Quie and Arne Carlson, who warned the state is steering toward an iceberg with no captain at the helm. He was correct: The “captain” has gotten his own boat and is rowing toward the horizon.

I’m going to depart for a moment from fisking Coleman, and take a shot at fisking the entire DFL. The whole “Arne Carlson was the mainstream” meme was the DFL’s dork-fingered version of Alinsky’s approach to campaigning long before anyone in Minnesota had heard of Saul Alinsky.  Of course, Arne Carlson is not a mainstream Republican. He’s a throwback to a pre-1976 world (which survived until 1998 in Minnesota, where the Reagan Revolution bypassed the MNGOP for twenty-odd years), trotted out purely to try to score points against the GOP.

But the lesson of this last two elections – conservatives win, “moderates” lose – is so obvious, even the MNGOP seems to have been getting it lately.

Both major parties — and the governor — share responsibility for the deep partisan divide that is hampering solutions to Minnesota’s problems. They also share a responsibility to put the state on sound footing.

And, unlike the DFL – which dithered its way through the session, thumbing its nose at the GOP all the way, and then tried to ram through a bloated monstrosity of a spending bill at the last second behind a foul rhetorical cloud of demands for “bipartisanship NOW!” – Pawlenty carried that responsibility out.  He fought – alone – against a two-chamber press.

And won.Twice.

I think he’s carried out his responsibility – the job for which he was elected – just fine.

Now, of course I’ve saved the worst for last.  As I predicted on the show this past Saturday, Coleman – being purely a monkey of the Minnesota mushy-left establishment – is so devoid of insight that he has to resort to casual defamation.

For a guy who acted as if the sky was falling when the president asked to speak to schoolchildren, Pawlenty sure seems laid back about his own obligations. He has dived so deep into the right-wing tide pool that by Thursday, he had joined Sarah Palin and a few other GOP confederates in threatening to invoke the 10th Amendment — in effect having Minnesota secede from the union on health care reform with little regard for the effect on Minnesota’s 450,000 uninsured citizens.

“Secede from the union”.  Just like those slave owners.  Tenth Amendment equal slavery!

Tim Pawlenty is too busy primping for the GOP presidential beauty contest and bizarrely making himself into a financial Pollyanna. Predictions put the next deficit at as high as three or four times the 2009 deficit — and without billions in federal stimulus funds to help close the gap.

Then perhaps the lesson will not be lost on Minnesotans; it’s time to quit electing  spendthrift DFLers to the Legislature.

But Pollyanna’s take on the coming crisis: “It’s a very manageable number,” he told the lovefest in Eden Prairie.

Waiter, I’d like whatever he’s having.

All together now:  Nick, you’ve had more than enough.  You’ve always had more than enough.

UPDATE:  A commenter notes that Coleman’s “prediction” – that next year’s deficit could be four times what it was projected for this year – would mean the deficit would be 85% as large as the budget itself.

And while I put nothing past the DFL, especially the current horde of hamsters in the Senate and House, that seems just a tad implausible.

So far.