The continued stalling of getting Al Franken seated in the Senate may be having much more serious consequences than anyone yet realizes. It's inevitable, of course, that having come close, the Republicans will never accept that they lost, and will therefore always hate Al Franken even more than they already would have, which is quite a lot, considering that (a) They hate Hollywood, and (b) firmly believe that only Republican actors and entertainers should ever be elected to public office. (c) They hate anyone with a sense of humor that doesn't revolve around sadism of some kind. (d) They hate anyone who is smart. (e) They hate anyone they can't intimidate. (f)... well, you get the point. Al is pretty much an all-purpose collection of every sort of thing the Republicans just can't stand.
WASHINGTON - The spirit of bipartisan change may be coming to the White House, but so far it has eluded the new Congress, where Minnesota's U.S. Senate recount has only widened the old partisan divide.
With a few days remaining before the inauguration of Barack Obama, Democrats are holding fast to their lockdown on Republican Norm Coleman, whose office has gone semi-dark -- barred from doing anything senatorial.
Because he's not a senator anymore!
Republicans, meanwhile, have turned what they see as the mistreatment of Coleman into a fundraising pitch to defeat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in 2010...
Senate Democrats say their actions regarding Coleman are not personal. "This is not anything we were looking for, but it's happened and we're going to deal with it as quickly as possible," said Jim Manley, a spokesman for Majority Leader Reid.
But Senate GOP leaders take a more jaundiced view, saying Reid's hard line against Coleman threatens Obama's vision of a post-partisan 111th Congress.
Totally typical. Any failure to kiss GOP ass "threatens Obama's vision of a post-partisan 111th Congress." Why, if Democrats really believed in bi-partisanship, they'd all just resign from the Senate and let the GOP run the whole thing!
But I spoke of more serious consequences, and I meant it. Because rigtht now, the future of our country hangs in the balance, and we need every powerful advocate we can get--particularly one like Al, with a talent for cutting through bullshit.
You see, Digby has a diary today, ""Serious People" Part XXVI", which is what got me started thinking about Franken all over again. The diary begins:
Jamison Foser's column this week is must reading. I'd begus noticing the same thing --- that the coverage of the economic crisis, in particular the gravitation to "serious" people whose track record shows that they have always been wrong about everything, is shockingly like the run-up to the Iraq war. When I watched that horrifying Pete Peterson propaganda piece on CNN last week-end, I could hardly believe I was seeing it all unfold exactly the same way --- again.
She goes on to quote a long exchange on Lou Dobbs, and then writes:
You try to untangle that rats nest because I couldn't. Apparently, the 8 trillion dollar Iraq war failed to fix the recession so Obama needs to get the private sector to create more jobs because Bill Clinton's hundred thousand police jobs didn't solve the crime problem and the jobs were lost. Oh, and the New Deal was a bust and everybody hates bailouts.
This is a particularly ugly example of the economic ignorance among the punditocrisy, but there is very little I've heard that sounds remotely convincing from our side anywhere. That is why bringing up "entitlements" and the deficit is such a threat to any successful recovery --- it's something about which people have been throughly indoctrinated and they can easily understand it. Nobody has bothered to educate them about liberal economics in decades, so when they are confused they turn to familiar refrains about how the government screws everything up and how it should be run like a business and how taxes are too high etc. Even the professionals don't know how to make a convincing case for government action in a crisis and they really need to.
Now, of course, I have no idea what Franken is going to be like as a senator. He can't help but still be a bit funny, but he knows that being a senator is a very different role. So we'll just have to see how it works out. But one thing is for certain--Franken is someone who's smart, passionate, compassionate and communicative, and there's just no way on God's green earth that we don't need someone like that--someone who's already a nationally known figure--on our side and fighting back against these evil no-nothing bastards. On top of that, I just have this sneaking suspicion that he'd do a lot better job pushing back against these bozos than most of his colleagues in the Senate.
Our country is hurting, and the peole who caused this are trying to make it hurt a whole lot more. And we need everyone we can possibly marshall to put an end to this. If their roles were reversed, can anyone imagine Al Franken laying back passively the way Harry Reid is right now, and letting the GOP block him from getting a new senator seated? I don't think so. I think that America is sorely in need of Al Franken's wit, intelligence, passion and commitment.
Not to mention his ability to point out patent absurdities and get us laughing about them.
STATE BLOGS
