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On Mon, 23 May 2005 22:53:30 -0400, "Michelle Malkin"
<hypatiab7@comcast.net> wrote:
http://www.startribune.com/stories/562/5415151.html
startribune.com
Last update: May 20, 2005 at 4:35 PM
Paul Scott: Norm's 'Celebrity Jeopardy'
Published May 22, 2005
There is a recurring "Saturday Night Live" sketch where Will Ferrell
plays Alex Trebek caught hosting a bizarro version of "Celebrity
Jeopardy." The cerebral Trebek begins staggering under the
scatalogical assault of Scotsman Sean Connery, parodied to full
Highlander excess by comedian Darrell Hammond.
I thought of that sketch while watching our senator take on George
Galloway last week. Except that by the end of the SNL sketch, Alex
Trebek has our sympathy.
It is becoming possible that a local, national and now international
disgust is mutating over the disingenuousness of Sen. Norm Coleman.
(The Nation's John Nichols recently called him "a plain old-fashioned,
drool-on-his-tie fool.") For those who first smelled a phony back when
Coleman said he wanted to go to Washington to "change the tone" -- as
if the naked hopefulness of Paul Wellstone was a tone that needed
changing -- watching his inquisition of Scottish Member of Parliament
George Galloway backfire so witheringly on Tuesday was like rolling in
a tub of banana cream pie.
Maybe Coleman wasn't already choking on the hypocrisy of having asked
for the resignation of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan over the
oil-for-food fiasco, when Coleman stands mute over his the fact of his
own party's leadership having so grossly mismanaged both the lead-up
to 9/11 and the intelligence behind the case for war. Without the
slightest apparent willingness to acknowledge such details, Coleman
called to testify one of the chief critics in Britain of the invasion
of Iraq, on oil-for-food charges he had already successfully refuted
in the British legal system.
Even on a day when the Republicans initiated the so-called nuclear
option, Galloway dropped into the U.S. news cycle like a haggis-filled
A-bomb. A fierce debater from a land of men who invented
hammer-throwing, a bruiser in a parliamentary system where the head of
state is regularly treated like a son who smashed in the Acura,
Galloway came to clear his name. And he was going to do this in front
of the man previously famous for having brought Lawson Software to St.
Paul.
He may be a lawyer, but Coleman is simply the wrong person to help the
Republicans claim the mantle of justice-seekers. Crusading
investigators are idealists. Coleman is a company man. He smiles. He
hits his marks. He watches his waistline and he says his lines. Jesse
Ventura was able to dispense with him during at least one debate just
by pointing at tasseled loafers. In the end, it wasn't clear why
Galloway's name was on some sketchy paperwork, and it wasn't clear
that it mattered. When Galloway opened with a lengthy evisceration of
the proceedings, the full Braveheart, Coleman countered with mumblings
that sounded more like a tax audit -- as if he genuinely thought he
was merely seeking facts, not political theater.
By mumbling his way through a litany of paperwork, when a strong case
had just been made about a larger, more deadly deception, it was clear
that the one thing Coleman had neglected to prepare for was the
weakness of his moral position. He is in no position, with his
president's war going this badly, to be sitting in judgment of those
who have argued for the relief of the Iraqi people, and, unlike the
path taken by Coleman, placed themselves in political peril by doing
so.
Most of all, there was something immeasurably disappointing, as one
writer to these pages observed, that it was not an American to be the
first to drop the pretense of congeniality when facing the desperate
diversions now underway in our Congress. There was something
immeasurably sad about the fact that 200 years after we told the
straight truth to an out-of touch England, it took a Brit to tell the
straight truth to us: "In everything I said about Iraq, I turned out
to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid
with their lives; 1,600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths
on a pack of lies."
Paul Scott is a writer living in Rochester, Minn.
© Copyright 2005 Star Tribune.
--
Contempt of Congress meter reading-offscale.
Hello, theocracy with a fundamentalist US Supreme
Court who will ensure church and state are joined
at the hip like clergy and altar boys.
America 1776-Jan 2001 RIP
"As democracy is perfected, the office of president
represents, more and more closely, the inner soul
of the people. On some great and glorious day the
plain folks of the land will reach their heart's
desire at last and the White House will be adorned
by a downright moron." --- H.L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)
Religion is the original war crime.
-Michelle Malkin (Feb 26, 2005)
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