We’ll accept it as a given that nobody in the Twin Cities media excites more deranged, dissociative ranting than Katherine Kersten.<\/p>\n
There’s really no arguing the point. Let’s move along with the premise.<\/p>\n
Yesterday, Kersten took a tongue-in-cheek swat<\/a> at perhaps the dumbest thing I’ve read in my life; a petition<\/a><\/em> to have her removed.<\/p>\n 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 <\/em>that stupid, and their votes do <\/em>count just as much as yours.<\/p>\n Note to Kersten’s many dim-bulb critics; a columnist <\/em>is a very different thing than a reporter<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n Oh, and the dissociation isn’t just the deranged hoi-polloi<\/em> of the febrile lefty-in-the-street; Paul Schmelzer, the Minnesoros Monitor’s occasionally-capable writer, who notes<\/a>:<\/p>\n One signatory of the petition might lend more credence to that criticism than most: the Pioneer Press’ David Hanners, who won a Pulitzer Prize<\/a> for the Dallas Morning News in 1989, was the eighth to sign.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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 <\/em>examples of the Monitor according religious faith any status in complaining about media coverage).<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n Sigh.<\/p>\n 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…<\/p>\n …the online Petition-o-matic site.<\/p>\n Ryan Rhodes has given it a test drive, and has started a demand to toss Nick Coleman<\/a> for actual crimes against truth vastly worse than those of which Kersten is wrongly accused.<\/p>\n Please – circulate it, and sign it.<\/p>\n