Because He's Such a Serious Man....

John McCain isn't bothered by Sarah Palin's scribbling his name off of a visor she wore during her Hawaii vacation.

Sen. John McCain brushed off the semi-controversy over his former running mate's visor Sunday, attributing the blog and talk show chatter about Sarah Palin's vacation attire to "hysterical attacks" from the left.

Yeah, which is why you only get coverage of the "story"....

Finally former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential and presidential nominees Sarah Palin. Made a potential political fashion faux -- while vacationing with her family in Hawaii. Palin was photographed wearing a visor from John McCain's failed presidential bid with the words McCain for president blacked out apparently and magic marker.

from left-wing sources like Fox News.

McCain, though, isn't very good at deciding what is or is not a "hysterical attack". I mean, if you're going to make a hysterical attack over somebody's vacation in Hawaii, you couldn't do much better than McCain's own campaign team and party.¹ McCain also doesn't seem to understand that his recent false, hypocritical attack on Senator Franken qualifies.
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1. That is, unless you're Cokie Roberts.

Speaking Truth When You Have Power

Recently, Senator Al Franken was given a rather blunt message that his actions in advocating for his anti-rape bill, he had crossed a line with Republican opponents of the bill.

In a chamber where relationship-building is seen as critical, some GOP senators question whether Franken’s handling of the amendment could damage his ability to work across the aisle.

You see, instead of smiling and saying, "They're representing their constituents," or at worst, "They're doing what they need to do to get reelected," Franken challenged the PR spin of opponents to the amendment on their merits. That simply isn't done.

Seriously, when a scandal breaks about a Senator or Member of Congress, how often do you think that the underlying material isn't common knowledge on Capitol Hill? When a Senator or Member of Congress goes on a TV or radio show and makes claims that are absurdly false or stupid, how often does one of his peers point that out rather than pretending that a serious point had been made? How often have you heard the "strange bedfellows"-type story - Orrin Hatch and Ted Kennedy were close friends. Bad behavior is kept under wraps because neither side would benefit from full disclosure of the personal foibles of their peers. And when somebody says something absurdly stupid or just plain false, that's supposed to be treated as a necessary act to represent the voters from their district and not as a particular act of venality.

Recall how mild rebukes from President Obama had Republicans seething in their seats, with Rep. Joe Wilson engaging in a childish breach of decorum (that make him the toast of the town with the childish wing of the Republican Party)? By the twisted logic of Wilson and, really, the Senate as a whole, the more serious offense appears to have been by President Obama. The truth? Irrelevant! How dare he come into Congress and suggest that, to oppose his agenda, any number of its elected members were flat-out lying? He should have respected that they were merely representing their constituents. Nancy Pelosi worked hard to prevent a censure. (Hardly atypical of how Congress enforces its ethics rules on its members.)

This type of "collegiality" doesn't just harm the public debate, it also blinds Senators to problems in their midst. Case in point, Joe Lieberman. Any number of his peers seem to be able to convince themselves that his public behavior is somehow divorced from what he will do when it's time to vote, that their past friendship means that he'll work with them. Many who know better refrain from speaking out, or speak only in the mildest of terms, apparently lest they damage their ability to work with their peers. There's no political price to pay within the institution in sitting quietly on your hands - or even for applauding - when a Trent Lott suggests that the nation would have been better off had Strom Thurmond's been elected President on his segregationist State’s Rights ticket in 1948. The damage comes when the public hears about the comment and creates an uproar - that's why the institutional demand on Senator Franken is "sit down and shut up".

When Senator Debbie Stabenow voted in favor of a constitutional amendment against "desecrating the flag", it would have been fair to comment, "She's doing what she needs to do to get elected." It wouldn't quite be the whole truth, mind you, as the Senior Senator from Michigan, Carl Levin, voted against it. The rest of the truth is that he's a lot more popular and effective than Stabenow, and is thus a lot more secure in his seat. But still, it would have been nice to see somebody display the courage of calling her out on the vote, as engaging in the worst form of pandering. I don't believe for a minute that she was "voting her conscience" on that one. In my opinion she knew the vote would fail, so she viewed it as an opportunity to try to build some credibility with those Michigan voters who support an anti-flag burning amendment. It would have been nice if somebody from among her Senate peers had called her out on that. No, it ain't gonna happen. And do I even need to mention the likes of Michelle freakin' Bachman?

The fact is, the brand of "collegiality" that is expected in Congress weakens it as an institution and as a legislative body. We don't need Senator Franken to "learn the rules, lest he be made an outcast" - we need a lot more senators like him, on both sides of the aisle.

Spinning Conspiracy Theories Is Fun....

But you can be a lot more convincing than this:

Al Franken could win the recount in the Minnesota Senate race.... But odd things have been happening. On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal noted that Mr. Coleman’s lead has been mysteriously shrinking, even before the recount begins. Election officials in various jurisdictions, mainly liberal, have been discovering “lost” ballots or “miscommunicated” results.

Well, that sounds bad. How about a f'rinstance?

It doesn’t look bright: one very Democratic area has discovered that its ballot-counting machines registered overwhelming support for Barack Obama but somehow didn’t tally any votes in the Senate race. Hmmm. Guess who those will turn out to favour.

Well, you don't have to be very smart to recognize that a district that has any appreciable number of voters, but where zero votes are cast for the U.S. Senate, odds are that you have a bona fide undercount. You don't have to be very smart to realize that in a district that has overwhelming support for Obama is likely to have at least majority support for Franken. And you don't have to be very honest to acknowledge that there's basis for alleging "conspiracy" in the counting of votes that were actually cast but inadvertently omitted from the first vote count.

So, what's the National Post's excuse, other than perhaps a desire to join the WSJ in a "race to the bottom" for editorial page partisan hackery? (And why aren't they obsessing over the vote count in a Canadian riding somewhere? Surely there's a fake scandal they can gussie up somewhere in Canada....)

The result is critical because the Democrats are three seats away from absolute control of the Senate, and two other states - Georgia and Alaska - also remain unsettled. If the Democrats somehow take all three, Republicans might as well spend the next four years on the beach.

For all the National Post's whinging about the possibility of the Democrats having a sixty vote majority in the Senate, I doubt that they would be expressing equal concern over a Conservative majority government in Canada's Parliament. But they should relax. It's extremely unlikely that the Democrats will win all three seats and, even if they do, Lieberman has all-but-promised to join Republican filibusters, so on many important issues they would still really be a seat short.

How Dare He Say Such A Thing...

Michael Gerson is appalled:

But the vulgarity of "The Jerry Springer Show" or misogynous rap music -- the cultural equivalents of Franken's political "satire" -- generally expresses contempt and cruelty. Franken is not content to disagree with Karl Rove; he calls him "human filth."

How could Franken say such a mean thing about Turd Blossom? It's time to raise the level of political discourse!

I liked this as well:

So what is Franken's "provocative, touching and funny" contribution to the genre? Consider his article in Playboy magazine titled "Porn-O-Rama!" in which he enthuses that it is an "exciting time for pornographers and for us, the consumers of pornography."

In Playboy? It's hard to imagine that they would publish adolescent sexually oriented humor pieces in Playboy.

"Porn-O-Rama!" is a modern campaign document every voter should read -- the Federalist Papers of lifestyle liberalism. It has the literary sensibilities and moral seriousness of an awkward adolescent nerd publishing an underground newspaper to shock his way into campus popularity

Again, this is Playboy we're talking about? Adolescent humor? I thought all they did was publish interviews with Jimmy Carter. (Let it never be said that Gerson isn't happy to regurgitate GOP talking points - but could he truly see an eight-year-old Playboy article as a "campaign document"?)

At an event hosted by the Feminist Majority Foundation in 1999, Franken offered this thigh-slapper: "Why don't we focus on what Afghan women can do? They can cook, bear children and pray. As I recall, that was fine for our grandmothers."

If only Gerson had gotten there on time, he could have explained to Franken that feminists don't have a sense of humor, and had no chance of figuring out that Franken was making fun of conservatives and not them. And, having read Gerson's column, we all now know that jokes about conservatives are not funny.

You know, as satire goes, at least to me Franken's not particularly compelling. He's far too obvious. I see him as much more a comedian who happens to address political subjects. But unlike Gerson, when I see somebody acting on a stage or performing on TV, I don't assume, "The person must be just like that in real life." Nor do I see the pulling of "shocking" punch lines from jokes told over a period of ten or twenty years, and presenting them as representative of a person, as particularly honest. (But if Gerson intends his own piece as satire of the "emptiness and viciousness of our political discourse", with his usual emphasis on "emptiness", maybe he's on the right track.)

Comparisons To Hitler

Suzanne Fields of the dubious "Washington Times" brings us this moment of unintentional hilarity:

We must wish Al Franken well. Heaven knows the left needs all the help it can get in its search for a place on the radio dial, but Al is going unarmed into a battle of wits and humor against Rush Limbaugh.

I've never been a huge Franken fan, but... c'mon. The rest of her editorial is a contrived effort to accuse liberal humorists of relying excessively on obscenity and the comparison of Bush to Hitler. (Conservatives would never do anything like that - not in a million years.)

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