Have Minnesotans lost all common sense, their sense of decency?

Six years ago on Oct. 25, 2002, near where I grew up in northern Minnesota, an airplane crash took the lives of Paul and Sheila Wellstone, a member of their staff, their daughter Marcia and the two pilots. Senator Wellstone was running for a third term in the United States Senate, breaking a term-limit promise he had made when first elected.  It was a tragedy of a high order, coming just a week before the election.

That crash in a dense forest north of Duluth set off a whirligig of 11th hour campaigning between Wellstone's swiftly-appointed replacement, former Vice President Walter F. Mondale, and St. Paul Mayor Norm Coleman. Then, as if to confirm the fateful madness, a so-called “memorial service” for the Wellstones at our public university turned hatefully ugly, and highly politicized.  Coleman won a cliff-hanger to become the junior senator from Minnesota.

Fast forward six years. After his distinguished first term, including chairmanship of signal committees for a freshman senator, and introducing bipartisan-approved legislation, Coleman found himself running for re-election against an expatriate Minnesotan, a stand-up comic, a self-described “satirist” named Al Franken.  His last job was running a failing liberal radio network and not paying his employee's workers' compensation insurance, among other minor mischiefs.

Considering the freakish Franken's vitriolic “humor,” his writings as a pornographer (rape of a network anchor a theme),  his inflamatory temper tantrums and far-left wacko views, few gave the ex-comic from Minnesota a ghost of a chance.  .

I certainly didn't. Here's what I wrote here in Intellectual Conservative on June 8th about Franken's chances:

“It's like a deaf man dancing, or a blind man shooting pool.”
– “Heaven Help The Fool,” by The Grateful Dead.

Franken brings a boatload of foul-smelling, filth-laden baggage to his bid for the Senate. Even in Minnesota, known for that kooky election (think Jesse Ventura), his real world chances are somewhere I believe (Boy Scout's honor!) between slim to none. That is, if my home state's electorate shows a shred of good sense and, yes, of decency.

Boy oh boy, was I ever dead wrong.  Good sense disappeared in the election.  Decency took a hike. As I write this, the race between Coleman and Franken is in a near-tie recount. Coleman leads by a slim 475 votes, out of three million.  My home state's voters let us down.  Believing evidnetly in weird, illogical, libelous Franken TV spots, enough Minnesota idiots put him into a virtual 42-42% tie with incumbent Senator Coleman.  Boggles the mind. It proves, one supposes, that if lies are told often enough, and boldly enough, in TV spots, they gain credence with some of the public. (Goebbels was right, only a series of “little” lies, unchallenged by news media, will suffice.  It doesn't take one Big Lie.)

BIG MONEY flowed in to Franken's campaign,  a lot from his far-left buddies, including a passel of his friends in Hollywood.Spurious, negative-to-the-bone, libelous Franken TV spots, scores of them, were aired in my home state, down 'n dirty, spilling a trail of bogus slime about Coleman, including one claiming he was “corrupt” and lived high on the hog in a “million-dollar mansion” in D.C. (In fact, he rents a room from a friend at $600 a month.  Damn his frugality!)

Poor 'ol Norm. Savaged by Franken's visceral hatred, a stream of lies, he could not keep up replying to the smears and bogus allegations. So toward the end, believing perhaps in the “shred of good sense” among Minnesota voters, he yanked his own “negative” TV spots and “went positive.” Pity him, for being a believer in fairness, and of the decency of Minnesota Nice, was a huge mistake.

Franken poured it on, full of hate and seeming vengeance, more lies, more misrepresentations of Coleman's record. At the end, some of Franken's stream of falsehoods provoked a late-game defamation lawsuit by Coleman against Franken's wild excesses. Too late, maybe, to affect an election, but filed as a matter of principle that Franken likely, in his fog of leftist rage, would never understand not being, himself, a decent sort.

So many of my fellow Minnesotans bought into Franken's lies. Perhaps in a mere token gesture of fairness, most statewide news media endorsed Coleman for Reelection. (Even the ultra liberal Minneapolis Star Tribune endorsed Coleman, proving that once, at least, as local blog Power Line aptly put it, “hell freezes over.”)

If common sense and critical thinking facilities held forth, it should have been Norm Coleman in a cakewalk for a second term. Even in blue state Minnesota, that would go eight percentage points up for Obama. A fair-minded person would've predicted a double-up 60% to 30% for Coleman.

But local idiots who believed Franken's lie-laced TV spots, today have put the senatorial race into a recount in my native state. An independent third candidate, Jesse Ventura's campaign manager a few years back, Dean Barkley, split both “D” and “R” votes. A vote for Barkley was a vote for “Someone Else.”

If Franken's idiots' votes put him over the top in the recount–a distinct possibility here, especially considering voting fraud (felons in prisons, for example, being registered by “Ds” to vote)–a travesty of large magnitude will have occurred in my home state.  Here's one Minnesotan who will become, posthaste, an ex-Minnesotan.  One electoral embarrassment (“Jesse the Body”) is enough embarrassment for one lifetime.

Editors' Note: Larson's column on June 9, 2008, titled “Al Franken (stein) (D-MN)?,” is found here:

http://intellectualconservative.com/2008/06/09/al-franken-stein-d-mn/