It’s no secret; I mix it up with a lot of the local leftybloggers. 

In most cases, it’s fairly good-natured stuff; it’s business, not personal.  I respect those of them that can write – Jeff Rosenberg and the former members of the late New Patriot kolkhoz, among a few others; some of them return the favor. 

 With others – most of them, in fact – we leave each other in splendid isolation.

Of course, some leftybloggers are a bunch of hysterical nutslaps.  These specimens take their dim, context-challenged whacks at me, and in return – in the rare cases when I can be bothered – I demolish whatever passes for their “points” between 5:30 and 5:35 AM, and then go have a bowl of oatmeal and put the laundry in the dryer.  I almost feel bad – I feel like I’m picking on the retarded kid, almost.  But it’s gotta be done.

Anyway, that’s been the pattern for a while now; the occasional nod, the broad ignore, the occasional gleeful pelting with rhetorical rocks and garbage.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

But there’s a new wrinkle on the horizon.

A few months back, I noted that there’d been long-standing rumors around Saint Paul that Senator and Mrs. Coleman had an “unconventional” marriage.  I wrote “It’s been an open secret forever in Saint Paul and Minnesota politics; Norm and his wife have a rather unconventional marriage”

And apparently more than a few leftybloggers have taken that offhanded mention – of a Saint Paul rumor – as some sort of unimpeachable source on the subject (example).  Of course, they blitzed on the context, not only of the “quote”, but of the post from which it came, which was to hammer on Fast Eddie Schultz’s boundless hypocrisy. 

So while I’m flattered (koff koff) to be considered a definitive, unimpeachable source on the subject, the simple fact is – I’m not.  I reported on a rumor that’d been rattling around my town for a while.  That is all.

So let me break this down for those of you who might have missed the blazingly obvious; the only fact that matters is that Senator and Mrs. Coleman are still married.

Look – I’m all about traditional marriage.  And let’s face it; if there were the faintest impetus to split, it’s not like being divorced is a barrier to anyone in this day and age; Rudy Giuliani and his admittedly colorful marital history were serious contenders for the presidency (indeed, in some ways a better contender than the one we got).  And yet, whatever the truth behind their marriage is (and once again let’s be clear here – its none of your damn business, and mine either, and if you ever, even once, said that the nation needed to “move on” during the Clinton Administration, you really need to “move on” yourself, and right now), they are together after a bazillion years. 

And that’s pretty cool.

Of course, Al and Franny Franken have also been married forever, and that, too, is a wonderful thing.

The difference, of course, is that Franken represents a party that piddles on the family.  I’m not talking the hoary “family values” cliches left over from the eighties – I don’t care that Franken wrote for Playboy, and that he cusses when he does his speaking engagements.  I don’t even care so much about gay marriage – I oppose it on religious grounds, but support civil unions – and while I believe that kids’ development is best served by hetero parents (because kids need male and female parents, all other things being equal), I also think adoptive gay parents are a better option for kids than, say, a single parent.

But the Democrat party piddles on the family in many more subtle ways than that.  It is utterly beholden to the teachers’ unions, and that union has done more than most forces in our lives to undercut the family and trivialize parents.  Hollywood (of which Franken is a part) plays its role as well.  And the stresses caused to middle-class families by relentless taxation do nobody any good – to say nothing of the catastrophic role that liberal politics have played on economically-disadvantaged families, especially African-American ones.

So as a general rule, Republican candidates are better for families than Democrat ones, no matter what their personal lives might be.

I said might.  Again, none of your damn business – but the Coleman marriage, unlike about half of the marriages in our society, has lasted. 

So all of you leftybloggers who are using me as a source on the subject of Coleman’s marriage?  Make sure you update your coverage to include this last, binding bit.  If you don’t, you’ll be guilty of wantonly selective quoting; you’ll be called on it. 

I can say that; apparently, I’m the authoritah.