It looks like Al Franken may be winning the recount in Minnesota. While I was trolling the net this morning I came across this article at Rolling Stone, by Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone about the recount, Coleman and Franken. It’s a fun article, and well worth a read. Taibbi makes a point at the end with which I heartily agree: it would be sad if Franken buried his sense of humor under his senatorial gravitas, should he get elected. Humor can be a powerful political weapon, if, as always, it is in the right hands. Fortunately, our side tends to be better at the humor game than the other, probably because, as Taibbi writes, humor is about the truth.
I do have a bone to pick with Taibbi. I confess I’m being lazy here, because I’ve said all this before. On the other hand, we need to keep repeating this stuff until the message gets through. Taibbi makes the point that Coleman ran his campaign, and is participating in the recount, in a manner reflective of his basic personality. In case you were not aware, Coleman is basically an asshole. Taibbi describes Coleman’s recount behavior as follows:
It was behavior straight out of the red-blue death-match ethos of the past 15 years, in which Democrats and Republicans alike were willing to undermine public confidence in the legitimacy of things like elections, confirmation hearings or court rulings to serve partisan ends. The notion that an elected official can’t count votes in an impartial fashion or conduct a lawful criminal investigation simply because he happens to belong to one party or another ought to be antithetical to our view of government, but we have gone there over and over in recent years, training the public to be almost reflexively paranoid about the legitimacy of government action. From independent prosecutors (Ken Starr) to the Supreme Court (Bush v. Gore) to bipartisan congressional investigations (the 9/11 Commission) to the attorney general (Alberto Gonzales), no wing of government was safe from charges of partisan politicization.
There is a fundamental problem with this reflexive propensity to blame the parties equally for the stench in Washington. It ignores the truth. I’m not quite sure what Democrats have done to undermine the legitimacy of “things like elections, confirmation hearings or court rulings”. They haven’t tried to steal any elections that I can recall, nor have they sought to undermine the legitimacy of any legitimate elections. And there’s the rub. There is such a thing as truth, and a statement like Taibbi’s presumes that we can disregard the merits of the various issue that have arisen in the past 15 years.
Each of Taibbi’s examples involved Republican partisanship. The Democrats, for example, did not make a concerted effort to undermine Ken Starr’s legitimacy, at least not until he had done so himself. Hearken back. The first special prosecutor had concluded that Clinton had done nothing wrong. That prosecutor was lawlessly replaced by a partisan judge who put the partisan Ken Starr in his place. (This is all long before Lewinsky by the way) Starr proceeded to engage in what almost any sane person now agrees was a partisan witch hunt of the first order. As to the rest of Taibbi’s examples, at least two led to charges of undue partisanship because the charges were true. Try to find a lawyer or a judge who believes that Bush v. Gore would have gone the same way had the positions of the candidates been reversed. Try to argue that Gonzales was not abusing his office for partisan purposes. Even his successor was forced to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate him. The evidence of wrongdoing at the Justice Department is overwhelming.
If anything, the Democrats have allowed themselves to be rolled time and again, down to the present day, as they cede power to the rump Republicans in the Senate who intend to govern by filibuster.
When my kids were growing up, my wife often reminded them that “the truth is important”. It is simply not true that the parties are equally culpable for undermining the legitimacy of our institutions. (Bear in mind that the bedrock principle of right wing “philosophy” is the notion that government itself is illegitimate.) The Democrats are not without sin, but their sins were venial indeed compared to the mortal sins committed by the Republicans since they captured the House in 1994.
