{"id":12426,"date":"2010-08-04T07:51:38","date_gmt":"2010-08-04T12:51:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=12426"},"modified":"2020-12-21T05:32:39","modified_gmt":"2020-12-21T11:32:39","slug":"tubed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=12426","title":{"rendered":"Tubed"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nick Coleman, longtime bete noir<\/em>\/kicktoy of regional conservative bloggers,\u00a0 is back on the beach:<\/a><\/p>\n

The message was eloquently written, but crystal clear. For one year now, Coleman had been a senior fellow at the school’s Eugene J. McCarthy Center for Public Policy & Civic Engagement. He’d tacked his title onto his opinion columns in the Star Tribune each Sunday. Now the school wanted him gone.<\/p>\n

Budget challenges had caused the school to reconsider the fellows program, wrote Joe DesJardins, the school’s vice provost. But the real reason for Coleman’s ouster was spelled out in DesJardins’s carefully chosen next words.<\/p>\n

“Unfortunately, many of our alumni and friends interpreted your by-line as a Senior Fellow of the McCarthy Center as an implicit SJU endorsement of the opinions you express,” DesJardins wrote. “This has brought St. John’s into the political sphere in ways that we had not anticipated and think is not in St. John’s best long-term interest.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’ll give Mr. DesJardins the benefit of a doubt; perhaps he was one of the monks, and he’d swore a vow of never reading the Strib<\/em>, just like most otherwise independent-thinking and well-informed Minnesotans.\u00a0 Perhaps he had no idea about Coleman’s decades-long career as a DFL cheerleader, his “Air America Minnesota” talk show, and his history.<\/p>\n

And it’s not like he had any road to Damascus moments while working for “Big Mac”; he pretty much romped and played in familiar territory, cheerleading the DFL establishment<\/a> and catcalling the usurpers<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We’re not done with far-fetched:<\/p>\n

“I do think something is out of whack when he’s a part of it and a liberal columnist can’t be,” Coleman says of Kennedy.<\/p>\n

“I do think something is out of whack when he’s a part of it and a liberal columnist can’t be,” Coleman says of Kennedy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It makes it sound like the termination was political.\u00a0 Which might make more sense if Amy Klobuchar weren’t giving the center’s next lecture<\/a>, and the center blog<\/a> didn’t have a subtle but distinct patina of Obama worship.<\/p>\n

What Coleman didn’t know was that efforts to unseat him from St. John’s had been brewing for months.<\/p>\n

Bob Labat, a 1959 St. John’s grad who has donated to the school every year since, noticed Coleman’s columns right away. Labat found Coleman grating\u2014a quality he considered inappropriate for someone associated with the Catholic school.<\/p>\n

“He has every right to be as caustic and as strong in his opinion as he wants to be, but when you’re also writing on the masthead of an academic institution, that’s a problem,” Labat says.<\/p>\n

He wasn’t alone. In September, Len Busch, who has given $20,000 to the St. John’s theology department each of the last three years, authored a handwritten message about Coleman.<\/p>\n

“As long as St. John’s has this man on the payroll, I will no longer give my money to St. John’s,” Busch wrote. “I will not support lies and false statements and half truths about anyone.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A lot of us former Strib <\/em>subscribers know the feeling.<\/p>\n

But I don’t whistle past graveyards.\u00a0 I hope Coleman lands a gig soon.\u00a0 While there’s no shortage of material, one must neither take things for granted nor wish ill on people; I don’t believe in Karma, but I do think what goes around comes around.<\/p>\n

So best of luck, Nick.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nick Coleman, longtime bete noir\/kicktoy of regional conservative bloggers,\u00a0 is back on the beach: The message was eloquently written, but crystal clear. For one year now, Coleman had been a senior fellow at the school’s Eugene J. McCarthy Center for Public Policy & Civic Engagement. He’d tacked his title onto his opinion columns in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63,4],"tags":[208],"class_list":["post-12426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lefty-alt-media","category-media","tag-a-klo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12426"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12426\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76186,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12426\/revisions\/76186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}