By R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. on 7.2.09 @ 6:09AM
And he should be red-faced about how he stole the recount, thanks
to which he has been sentenced to serve at least five years in
the U.S. Senate.
WASHINGTON -- The Minnesota Supreme Court has now ended months of
vote fraud and other assorted acts of skullduggery to pronounce
Al Franken winner of the state's 2008 senatorial race over
Republican Norm Coleman. The process was unseemly, and it is
conceivable that the court's justices merely acted out of civic
pride. They did not want Minnesota's U.S. Senate races to attain
the sort of notoriety attached to aldermanic elections in Chicago
or presidential elections in Iran.
Mr. Franken is an admitted clown. As such he will be the only
admitted clown in the United States Senate, though he will be
seated with such clownish figures as Senator John Kerry and
Senator Harry Reid. Perhaps his desk will be near that vacated
recently by Senator Larry Craig, the lavatorian-conservative now
thankfully retired, perhaps to found an intellectual journal for
his lavatorian movement. A good title might be, Bathroom
Beautiful.
Upon hearing of the court's decision, Franken joked that he was
"thrilled and honored by the faith that Minnesotans have placed
in me." That is not a very funny joke, but Franken is not funny.
By "Minnesotans" he is probably attempting irony in referring to
his supporters on vote canvassing boards in several left-leaning
counties who turned up a sufficient number of thitherto uncounted
votes to give him the edge.
In the November 4 election Coleman won by 725 votes. After a
recount he still won by 215. Then Franken's "Minnesotans" got
busy canvassing. They demanded that votes once disqualified in
their counties be counted. They found thousands of absentee
ballots previously rejected for such indelicacies as fabricated
addresses. Coleman cried foul and asked that one statewide
standard be applied to all recounts. However, he got nowhere with
this plea for equal protection of the law, and in the meantime
Franken's larcenous operatives picked up 1,350 more absentee
votes, some bearing the names of pop singers. Ultimately
Franken's team managed a 312-vote victory from the 2.9 million
votes cast.
The Wall Street Journal was not alone in its judgment
that "Mr. Franken now goes to the Senate having effectively
stolen an election." The Journal reminded Republicans
that this is not the first time in recent elections that
Democrats overturned an apparent defeat by sending swarms of
lawyers and operatives into a state to find once-discredited
ballots and claim victory. They practiced the same trickery in
2004 in the state of Washington's gubernatorial race wherein the
winning Republican had mysteriously come in second after a third
"recount."
In the aftermath of the Minnesota Supreme Court's decision
Franken deadpanned, "I won by 312 votes," and he went on to josh,
"So I really have to earn the trust of the people… of Minnesota,
and let them know -- not just by my saying so, but by my actions
-- that I'm going to be working for every Minnesotan" -- another
humorless joke. What work he will do he did not say. Possibly he
will sweep the floors of the Capitol or pick up litter on its
lawn. His service in government has been nil. Yet how much
service in government has our president had? Increasingly the
Democratic Party is the party of personalities, though Franken's
personality is markedly weird.
He was weird on Saturday Night Live in the 1970s where
he popularized a goof-ball character named Stuart Smalley, a
self-help guru who repeated over and again, "I'm good enough, I'm
smart enough, and doggone it, people like me." The audience
laughed. Using lines not a lot more sophisticated than that, he
campaigned for the Senate. My guess is that the Stuart Smalley
character is the essential Al Franken, a weirdo.
I experienced his weirdness first hand when I appeared as his
guest on a talk show he hosted for "Air America," the Liberals'
feeble effort to create an alternative to conservative talk
radio. At the time, he was an impassioned opponent of the 1990s'
"Clinton-haters," so impassioned in fact that he could have been
called a "Clinton-lover." Apparently aware of The American
Spectator's role in exposing poor Bill Clinton, Franken
asked me how I had passed the 1990s, obviously expecting me to
boast of my crimes. I stepped around his loaded question, and
with my trademark self-deprecating wit (reminiscent, I am told,
of JFK) rolled a handball across the desk from my microphone to
his, saying merely that I played a lot of handball during
Clinton's years of public embarrassment.
Franken went ballistic. "What is this," he said holding the
little blue ball in his hands and seething. I moved on to other
subjects and not surprisingly he lost control of the show. After
I departed he remained visibly perturbed. In fact three hours
later a friend of mine observed his leaving the studio with the
ball still in his hand as he snarled about it and my insouciance
toward him. Do you remember the controversy created by Liberals
with their unsubstantiated allegations of UN Ambassador John
Bolton's temper? My prediction is that Franken will not get
through his Senate term without anger management counseling, and
the Liberals will cover for him.
From a review of his simple-minded utterances on the campaign
trail with regard to issues, it is apparent that he is not a
consistent thinker. He will disappoint the liberals. If they can
keep him mad at Republicans, they will have his vote. But if he
calms down, anything might happen.
topics:
U.S. Senate, Voter Fraud, Stolen Elections
