I’ve all but given up on fisking Nick Coleman. It’s like slapping a brain-damaged dog with a newspaper when he pees on your floor; it’s not like it’s going to actually affect anything.
Indeed, I’ve pondered the notion of completely ignoring the doddering old duffer – a fate he truly deserves above all else.
But on his record Nick Coleman truly does have one vast, ghastly, unatoned crime against morality, against “right”, even against what used to be called “journalistic ethics” in a time before the term became a weasel-word for “framework allowing journalists to justify pretty much anything they do”.
His shameful, ghastly, ghoulish performance in the wake of the 35W bridge collapse.
A quick timeline for those of you in whom time has sanded off the fury:
- In the immediate wake of the disaster, Coleman blamed the Pawlenty Administration in a column (which, under the Strib’s singularly gutless policy, is unavailable online).
- He went on (where else?) MSNBC the Saturday morning after the collapse and, standing on the banks of the Mississippi, and loudly blamed the Pawlenty Administration and the failure of the Gas Tax hike for the collapse. He also wrote a line in response to claims that he and his ilk were politicizing the tragedy, a line that should be rubbed in the face of the entire Strib editorial board; “Is it political to be angry about that? So be it. Everything is politics. Politics is not a dirty word by itself. Politics builds bridges and schools and hospitals. And politics can make them fall down.” He ignored, natch, the simple fact that every administration had passed on comprehensive bridge maintenance, preferring instead to build more infrastructure.
- I predicted that Coleman, along with Alice Hausman and Elwyn “E-Tink” Tinklenberg, were going to owe the Administration an apology when the results finally did come out (but they probably wouldn’t do it anyway).
The scientists have spoken (over Jim Oberstar’s objections, natch); the collapse was the result of faulty – and opaque – calculations made when the bridge was designed, in 1967-68, as well as tons of construction equipment parked atop the bridge (doing, y’know, “maintenance”, the stuff that the Administration was criticized for not doing).
Coleman’s response? ignore all those “experts”; my agenda trumps your facts!:
The National Transportation Safety Board is able to explain structural failures. It is not much good at explaining governmental ones.
Especially when they are scientifically irrelevant.
The final report on the Interstate 35W bridge blames the collapse on an obscure bridge designer who, like 13 citizens trying to get home on Aug. 1, 2007, is dead.
The report, curiously, is silent on Nick Coleman’s non-sequitur juxtaposition of unrelated factoids to try to drum up a spurious, uninformed (indeed, disinformed) emotional reaction.
Conspiracy?
Let’s see, as he attempts to pull off the difficult Triple Non-Sequitur:
In effect, the NTSB adopted a conclusion reached days after the collapse by an outside consulting firm hired by Gov. Tim Pawlenty for $2 million — the exact same cost as a plan to reinforce the bridge that had been rejected by the same administration: “The dead guys did it.”
Pawlenty got the right answer for the exact cost of a “plan” that would likely not have prevented the bridge collapse in the first place, in other words.
A very convenient theory. But there’s one problem: Carol Molnau is still alive.
On the morning after the bridge collapse, I wrote here that “both political parties have tried to govern on the cheap” and both have scrimped “on the basics.” Still true. But the buck stops with the man in the governor’s chair, and during six years in office, Tim Pawlenty has stopped billions of bucks designated for crucial highway and bridge projects.
None of which would have prevented the collapse!
He has vetoed three transportation bills, including one that passed over his veto while he was engaged in a yearlong beauty pageant, trying out for Miss GOP V-P, a role that went to Caribou Killin’ Sarah Palin.
All of which happened after the collapse!
His complaints about being the target of premature and unfair criticism after the bridge fell should be viewed as the posturing of a guy who wants to be a standard bearer for the Republicans and needs to shake the mud off his feet.
No, Nick Coleman. His complaints were dead-on. You defamed him by trying to tie a general policy to a specific consequence…
…which the NTSB has just shown is completely untrue.
Is it unfair to link the bridge to the infrastructure problems that have grown much larger during Pawlenty’s tenure? Hardly.
The the same sense that it is perfectly fair to link the fact that Nick Coleman has a job to the decline of journalism? Sure. It’s perfectly logical; “if you fail to systematically unearth bad engineering” is to “bridges fall” as “journalism continues to erode into an agenda-driven exercise in partisanship” is to “Coleman has a gig”.
Beyond that…?
Despite his post-Obama-slide conversion to a belief that Republicans need to reach out to moderates, T-Paw has embodied the knife-point anti-government agenda of those who think the best way to shrink government is to prove that it doesn’t work. On Aug. 1, 2007, he may have felt the effort had gone a bridge too far.
Or he “may have” been leading a team of Israeli Commandos against a North Korean nuclear reactor in Zimbabwe, at about the time I “may have” been squiring Marisa Tomei about Manhattan and Nick Coleman “may have” been having unprotected conjugal relations with Larry Craig.
“May have”; two words that give weasels the power to move mountains.
“Premature?” How about unveiling plans for a new bridge while victims were in the river?
I’m dying to find out how, in Nick Coleman’s special little world, that’d be any worse than claiming – wrongly – to have solved the mystery based purely on political prejudice.
Is it?
I’m thinking “no”.
How about hiring a firm supposed to investigate independently that ended up partnering with the NTSB and fingering the gussets (before the wreckage was examined)? Premature? A week after the collapse, Pawlenty declared it “unrelated” to any shortcomings in inspection or maintenance.
Fast work, T-Paw.
A point that is, I’m sure, unrelated: He was right. Nick Coleman was irredeemably wrong.
The phrase “Inconvenient Truth” has been stripped of meaning in the past few years. A pity.
My point is: Choices were made in funding, inspecting, maintaining and repairing a bridge that yes, had a design flaw, but stood 40 years and never should have collapsed.Never. Ever. Collapsed.
Since Nick – longtime enemy of “ba-LAW-gers”, has adopted one of the most irritating blogging techniques (the. serial. periods. to. connote. emphasis.), perhaps it’s time to declare victory and leave the old dolt alone.
The bridge did collapse. There is very little reason to believe any amount of spending would have involved retroactively analyzing the gusset plate design, or that any of the supposed upgrades would have prevented the collapse at all.
Yes, Tim Pawlenty has a bad case of Potomac Fever, but he is Minnesota’s governor and he needs to stop complaining about unfair criticism and take Big Boy responsibility for a catastrophic failure that happened on his watch. He has not said what any governor must say:
“Minnesota, your government let you down. I am sorry. We did not do our job. There are no excuses.”
Sure. Perhaps Pawlenty should join with Jesse Ventura, E-Tink, Arne Carlson, Rudy Perpich, Al Quie, Wendell Anderson and, by the way, the ghost of Nick Coleman Senior, who was Speaker of the Minnesota House when the bridge was designed and built; perhaps that phalanx should admit the blazingly obvious, that mistakes happen and that government has never been able to repeal that fact, and move on to try to do things better.
It’s probably more likely than the Star/Tribune making the same admission as Nick Coleman is chased from the building.
———-
The Strib will never chase Nick Coleman from the building. But I will chase him from this blog. He is a doddering old fool, in the classical sense of the term “fool”, and is of no value to this community, to journalism…
…or, really, to this blog, anymore. Fisking the old duffer has become a rote exercise. It’s like playing basketball against people on crutches.
And so while there’s no way I will guarantee this promise, and there’s no way for anyone to enforce it, I retire from fisking Nick Coleman. A year after a bridge collapse that was the nadir of a career of mediocre petulance, Nick Coleman lived down to even the minuscule expectations I had of him.
There is really nothing more to say about him; so I hereby wall off that cavern-full of thud-witted venality from my consciousness forevermore.
Probably.
I’ve all but given up on fisking Nick Coleman – you mean, except for the fact that given any chance, you write about him…
And damned good thing you’ve given up. If you hadn’t, this post of yours might be 20,000 words, instead of 10,000.
The point Mitch, isn’t the length, it’s that your premise is BS. You’ve done no such thing, and Coleman frankly writes better than you, so take a lesson from him. You dissemble facts with the best of them and ignore them to spout agenda moreso than nearly anyone else I can think of. You are the Ann Coulter of the Minnesota blog scene, except you don’t have nice legs (well, not nice to me ;), and your rants really aren’t pure invective, but they sure are pure spin. Coleman’s a columnist, disagree all you like, but if you want to get exercised over the fact that he has his viewpoint, honestly, it’s an awful lot of wasted words.
Oh, and irritating blogging techniques (the. serial. periods. to. connote. emphasis.),
Yes.
You’ve.
Never.
Done.
That.
Ever.
Nope.
Pot, meet kettle.
and Coleman frankly writes better than you, so take a lesson from him.
Yeah, Mitch, try to write more like Nick Coleman. You know, the guy who once wrote: What have we learned, class, about free speech after listening to Coulter call Democrats traitors to the country, threaten to give a Muslim student’s name to homeland security and toss insults faster than a kid with a Dixie cup full of fish parts can toss herrings at a seal exhibit?
That’s the kind of stellar prose you should be shooting for, Mitch! Such style! Such grace! Such. . . sense!
Oh, and irritating blogging techniques (the. serial. periods. to. connote. emphasis.),
You really don’t get irony, do you, Peev? Nick spent years railing against the techniques and writing employed by bloggers, yet here he is using one of blogging’s most established literary devices. Mitch has ALWAYS been a blogger, you moron. He can use all the blogging techniques he wants. Man, you are one dense pile of dog crap.
You really don’t get irony, do you, Peev?
Missing the point has long been a Peev staple on this blog.
And I”m about done fisking Peev’s comments, too.
But what the heck.
I’ve all but given up on fisking Nick Coleman – you mean, except for the fact that given any chance, you write about him…
Fairly easily dispensed with, really; see how many columns Coleman has written in the past two years, and then compare with the number of times I’ve written about his columns, especially those not relating to the bridge collapse.
Pretty sparse, really.
And damned good thing you’ve given up. If you hadn’t, this post of yours might be 20,000 words, instead of 10,000.
Um, yeah.
The point Mitch, isn’t the length, it’s that your premise is BS. You’ve done no such thing,
Um, sure. Whatever.
and Coleman frankly writes better than you
There are some judges of writing that I’ll take seriously.
Light leaving them right now will not reach you, Peev, until long after we’re both dead.
. You dissemble facts with the best of them and ignore them to spout agenda moreso than nearly anyone else I can think of.
Then you don’t think a whole lot.
You are the Ann Coulter of the Minnesota blog scene, except you don’t have nice legs (well, not nice to me , and your rants really aren’t pure invective, but they sure are pure spin.
I’m not sure you even know what that sentence really means.
Coleman’s a columnist, disagree all you like, but if you want to get exercised over the fact that he has his viewpoint, honestly, it’s an awful lot of wasted words.
You really don’t get it at all, do you?
I don’t care that he has a viewpoint. It comes with being human.
The problem isn’t even that his is wrong.
The problem is that after being objectively and empirically rebuked by fact, he’s still trying to make the disaster something it was not.
That’s the problem.
Do try to keep up with the rest of the class.
The same thing that bugs me about Krugman bugs me about Coleman. Both are given precious op-column inches. Both could use their talents to educate people about something that is unknown or under-reported. Both, instead, use their columns to repeat liberal talking points.
Coleman could have made the point in his column that Mitch did in his post — that it is politically much easier to fund new infrastructure than it is to maintain existing infrastructure.
This is a problem with politics in general. It is not confined to left or right, or even to democracy. When it coms time to slice up the public pie, the popular projects get the biggest slice, regardless of what is really ‘needed’.
It is, for example, politically easy to lop a few million dollars of the state library books budget and use the money to build a new, but nearly empty library.
It’s easier to build an expensive, heavily subsidized light rail project than it is to put money in the budget to inspect and repair freeway bridges.
Or have Jim “Mr Pork” Oberstar build a 4 lane hwy to no where north of Virginia Minn when the Minn DOT said they don’t want it, that they want to use that money elsewhere.
Or same person push to build a “high speed” passenger line to Duluth when existing higher density routes (Chicago-St Paul) are underserved.
“”The problem is that after being objectively and empirically rebuked by fact, he’s still trying to make the disaster something it was not.””
Which, of course, is wrong. See, you guys are clinging to a design flaw as the sole cause of the accident, but when you actually look at the report, the design flaw in and of itself was not enough to bring the bridge down, it was the senseless and misguided band aid approach by the No New Taxes Pawlenty administration and his surrogates (read Monlau) who chose to slap a band aid on a more serious issue that, in FACT made it worse. But you know that!
From what I can tell, Coleman was a lot more right then anyone on the Right was.
Flash
Flash,
Like Coleman, you are projecting all kinds of your own context into the report.
The report faulted deferred maintenance. The deferred maintenance was not specifically associated with ANY specific legislative or gubernatorial initiative.
Someone, somewhere, show me ANY maintenance proposed over the past 30 years, under ANY administration, that would have systematically addressed the gusset plate issue (which was, let’s not forget, the critical issue cited in the report), and *maybe* Flash, Coleman and Oberstar will have a point.
I’m not holding my breath.
Flash, do you think that building a light rail line was more important than bridge maintenance?
Nobody on the left has ever managed to show specifically how higher taxes=bridges not falling down. They take it as a matter of faith.
Judging by past example, if the Minnesota legislature & executive branch had managed to raise taxes high enough to generate, say, a hundred million bucks for transportation, they would have extended the Minnehaha line or added more bus routes.
Flash has reached “Level II” in the Sorosphere hierarchy. In his present state of enlightenment, it is no longer necessary for him to move his lips to speak the word of Soros, or move his fingers to type the word of Soros.
He just needs to open the top of his empty braincase and let the Soros spill out.
He’s teh kewl moonbatty!
Meanwhile, Peevee is still just a low grade liar…but he tries hard!
in FACT made it worse.
This “fact” word you use. I believe you are mistaken as to the definition.
Where flash sees “band aid,” most normal people see “maintanence.”
Maintanence work + unforseen and aging design flaw + plus rush hour traffic = bridgey/splashy. It’s not that difficult to figure out, unless you’re bound and determined to make political hay out of something that simply shouldn’t be political. For some people though, it’s ALWAYS political, and those people live sorry, unfulfilling lives, and they also think Nick Coleman is a good writer, which is even more disturbing.
Nick Coleman isn’t George Soros’s monkey…he’s his own chimp.
C’mon Mitch, don’t you remember the Great Bridge Debate of 2004? It was in all the papers. We spent the entire summer discussing bridge infrastructure and gusset plates. Who could forget the angry mob descending on El Tinklenberg’s house, screaming about his malfeasance in not using his bully pulpit to address 38-year old calculations? I can still see it in my mind’s eye – poor Tinklenberg trying to fight off the angry mob by waving copies of a perfect-bound inspection report, shouting “this report may not be a gusset plate, but it is my shield against you heathens!”
And remember the substantive debate about how we couldn’t abide the scandalous condition of our infrastructure all the way back in 1990? I didn’t even live here yet, but word of the debate reached all the way to Chicago. I can still see the video of Jon Grunseth conducting a press conference in his hot tub, complaining to anyone who would listen that “if we don’t replace those gusset plates on the 35W bridge, Minnesotans are going to be in as much hot water as I am right now.”
And who could forget the sight in 1996 of Paul Wellstone’s campaign bus detouring onto Washington Avenue, refusing to cross the 35W bridge, and his memorable harangue from the 3rd Avenue bridge where he declared that the bent gusset plates made it “a bridge too far?”
They were brave men, Mitch, all of them, fighting for the commonweal. We ignore their cries at our peril.
D:
Hah!
flash said:
“when you actually look at the report, the design flaw in and of itself was not enough to bring the bridge down”
Is that why it didn’t go down when no cars, or people, or equipment were on it? Thanks for stating the obvious, flash!
“it was the senseless and misguided band aid approach by the No New Taxes Pawlenty administration and his surrogates (read Monlau)”
Because the bridge was under 5 years old? If not, your point is little more that haymaking BS, flash. Not that it was ever in doubt. :-/
Come on, D, you know flash is the kind of guy who spent the weekend running simulations to determine if he could hang the kids’ bikes from the garage ceiling this winter. You know he’s that kind of guy who wouldn’t trust any engineer to get it right even though the garage has been standing for years and he’s done this before! There might have been a new bend in a nail after all!
Excellent point, nerdbert! That’s why we all should all support Flash’s campaign to deliver all the money that MnDOT needs to fix existing infrastructure problems.
He’s busy in his garage now, running a regression analysis that will spell out, once and for all, the optimal level of oversight needed to prevent all unexpected events from happening. He’s unlocked the special VLOOKUP function in his Excel spreadsheet that governs omniscience and he’s poised to leap into action. The only thing that’s holding him up is that he is required by statute to deliver his analysis and the requisite funding personally to the Capitol building via approved multimodal transportation. And as soon as the light rail line is built, he’ll deal with these budget shortfalls, by thunder.
So, in Flash`s and Penguin`s world it`s not the design of the bridge, but whoever is maintaining it at the time of it`s failure that are to blame. Ok. So, let`s say for intance, i bought one of those cars years ago, (i can`t remember the model- a Ford, maybe, from the 60`s or 70`s?) that the design at the time had the fuel tank too far rearward, or at least in a position where if the car was rear-ended it many times exploded and caught fire causing many deaths. In the world of Lib logic, if i was driving one of those, and was rear-ended and killed, it would have been my fault, instead of Ford (or whoever) that designed the car? Remember, it`s ‘my’ car, and ‘my’ maintenence. Ok.
In a democracy politicians get a pay off for doing the popular thing, like building light rail or improving little-used roads rather than doing bridge maintenance. Doing the objectively good thing for infrastructure or society is often not very popular at all. Hence the desire of idealistic political movements to divorce themselves from the democratic process. You really can’t do what is good for the people if the people are looking over your shoulder and can throw you out of office.
It’s a paradox. You can either have a government that is responsive to the desires of the people or you can do what is best for the people. You can’t do both.
Award Troy the point for clarity. The bridge was doomed to fail at some point because of the design flaw. Every legislature since it was built has spent transportation money on something OTHER than finding unknown and unsuspected design flaws in bridges. No amount of money spent under Governor Pawlenty would have gone to finding unknown and unsuspected design flaws in bridges. No amount of money NOT spent under Governor Pawlenty would have found unknown and unsuspected design flaws in bridges. It is patently absurd to suggest that a Governor, regardless of his action or inaction, caused this tragedy. It is criminal stupidity to insist on it.
Mitch has it right. Ignore the ignoramus.