{"id":7157,"date":"2009-12-17T13:10:27","date_gmt":"2009-12-17T18:10:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=7157"},"modified":"2009-12-17T11:50:05","modified_gmt":"2009-12-17T16:50:05","slug":"waiting-on-his-dim-overlords","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=7157","title":{"rendered":"Keeping Up With The Coleman-ians"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>While I&#8217;ve spent much of the last eight years bagging on former (?) Strib columnist Nick Coleman, it&#8217;s not been an unalloyed thing.\u00a0 When he&#8217;s focused on <em>being a city columnist<\/em>, as opposed to a not-overbright pundit, he writes good stuff; at his best, he&#8217;s sort of a &#8220;made in Singapore&#8221; Studs Terkel.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Of course, he was rarely at his best; less and less so as the years unwound.\u00a0 He hit his <em>nadir <\/em>during the 35W Bridge collapse; he got downsized from the columnist stable shortly thereafter.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>He&#8217;s apparently found some sort of work with some sort of think tank.\u00a0 But I suspect his &#8220;downsizing&#8221; was\u00a0more than\u00a0tad Potemkin; he still appears in the Strib.\u00a0 Lots.<\/p>\n<p>And it&#8217;s just not the same Nick.\u00a0 I busted him over the summer, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=5230\">parroting MN2020 shrieking points<\/a>, and not very well at that.\u00a0 It&#8217;s almost like he gets copies of press releases, and just writes in condescending and not very literate insults between the lines.<\/p>\n<p>So what&#8217;s Nick up to now?\u00a0\u00a0Well, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.startribune.com\/opinion\/commentary\/79092122.html?page=3&amp;c=y\">you be the judge<\/a>\u00a0(emphasis added), a week or so ago he turned his keen journalistic senses to what he apparently thought was the key conservative issue of the past few weeks- Obama pre-empting &#8220;A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving&#8221;:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I also heard a &#8220;Tea Party&#8221; supporter on radio claiming that you can tell Obama hates America just by looking at him. All I can tell by looking at him is that his skin color is different than that of every other president. <em>Maybe that&#8217;s what the Tea Party person meant<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Ah.\u00a0 The old &#8220;Wing Nutz Are Teh Racist!, based on the off-handed and ill-considered (at best) remark by one person dragged out of context and immortalized by whomever \u00a0controls the edit suite&#8221; bit.\u00a0\u00a0I hate to say it, but Coleman is making that whole &#8220;parrotting MN2020 without thinking&#8221; thing look pretty good in retrospect.\u00a0 He&#8217;s now down to parrotting&#8230;Keith Olbermann?\u00a0 Fast Eddie Schultz?\u00a0 Rachel Maddow?<\/p>\n<p>I was going to leave it at that.\u00a0 Because I&#8217;ve long since learned that any effort I spend fisking Coleman is effort I could have spent&#8230;I dunno, itching my elbow?<\/p>\n<p>But this is rich &#8211; where by &#8220;rich&#8221; I really mean &#8220;depressing that someone gets paid for writing the kind of duckspeak that&#8217;d get ignored on a fourth-rate leftyblog&#8221;.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<div id=\"pageDiv1\">\n<p>We&#8217;ve heard the socialist slur repeatedly from such brilliant students of history as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michele Bachmann (Minnesota&#8217;s Poster Girl for Why We Need High School Civics Classes)<\/p><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Says the guy who is a case study in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1988\">how badly our system fails our students at science, logic and empirical reasoning<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>and that pinnacle of wit and wisdom, Sean Hannity, who is the kind of Irishman my people used to refer to as &#8220;Blueshirts.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>&#8220;&#8230;my people&#8230;&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Your people&#8221;, Mr. Coleman, came to America so that they could at long last leave their squalid anscestral squabbling back in the Old Country.\u00a0 Like most of &#8220;our people&#8221;, they came to this country so they could escape, transcend and eventually forget the bigotries, hatreds and jealousies of their caste-ridden, incompetent homelands.<\/p>\n<p>So do &#8220;your people&#8221; proud, and leave your callow IRA references at Ellis Island; &#8220;your people&#8221; are now a bunch of plush-bottom yahoos who have <em>been <\/em>&#8220;the man&#8221; in this country for generations; Among &#8220;his people&#8221; his father, the former Speaker of the Minnesota House; his little brother Chris is the King George III of Saint Paul; Nick himself is the very Charles Townsend-esque embodiment of &#8220;the status quo&#8221; in the Twin Cities media.<\/p>\n<p>Blueshirt this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>While I&#8217;ve spent much of the last eight years bagging on former (?) Strib columnist Nick Coleman, it&#8217;s not been an unalloyed thing.\u00a0 When he&#8217;s focused on being a city columnist, as opposed to a not-overbright pundit, he writes good stuff; at his best, he&#8217;s sort of a &#8220;made in Singapore&#8221; Studs Terkel.\u00a0 Of course, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63,79,44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lefty-alt-media","category-slander-files","category-stupid"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7157","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=7157"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7157\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7261,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7157\/revisions\/7261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}