How low can Norm Coleman’s campaign sink?


Really low. Here’s an anti-Al Franken brochure that’s being mailed around here in Minnesota—that’s aimed at kids, with childish illustrations, while accusing Franken of some contemptible acts.

“Come on in, kids… Senator Franken’s going to tell a few jokes!”
“We shouldn’t have to be ashamed of Minnesota’s senator!”
Al Franked tackled a protestor at a political rally- and bragged about it
“We shouldn’t have to wonder what he will say…”
Al Franken wrote a pornographic column in Playboy- and thought it was funny.
“We shouldn’t have to apologize for his actions…”
Al Franken has written so-called comedy routines about raping women.
Al Franken: A bad example for our kids; completely unfit for public office

Charming. Man, but I hope Coleman sinks into the sewage permanently next week — but apparently this is still a very close race.

Comments

  1. Bill Dauphin says

    Regarding “Al Franken tackled a protestor at a political rally – and bragged about it,” my understanding of the incident in question is that he has every reason to brag: He assisted in event security in subduing a violent heckler who was trying to prevent the candidate (Howard Dean) from speaking. What’s not to be proud of?

    Hope y’all are volunteering to GOTV, etc., to make sure Al beats this scum Coleman!

  2. foxfire says

    I would think the Ted Stevens guilty verdict on 7 counts of lying will not be helpful to a bunch of Republicans for the next several news cycles.

    Could Coleman possibly take Bachmann with him on the new journey to the Sewer Shark game? I bet they could garner an honorary Skinhead detail for the trip.

  3. says

    I can’t understand how it could even be close. I mean, people are actually going to vote for Coleman knowing that he is this sleazy and dishonest?

    He’s not even targeting eligible voters with these pathetic acts of desperation.

  4. Wowbagger says

    They subscribe to a belief system where, if they do something morally questionable, all they have to do is beg they invisible super-bestfriend for forgiveness and it’ll be granted. They can do all the lying, stealing and cheating they want and as long as they say ‘pretty please with sugar on top’ they still get to go to heaven.

    I stopped being surprised by the depths to which they’ll stoop a very long time ago.

  5. Dahan says

    I know it’s easy to blow off anything anyone says in a room like this as so much BS, but what I have to say is the absolute truth, whether it’s believed or not.
    I have two female friends who have both worked with Coleman (one as a lawyer, one a lobbyist). Both were hit on by him (yes, he’s still married). My wife has met him a few times, and while she hasn’t been “hit on” he did get pretty “handsy” with her last time.
    This is the man that McCain almost chose as his VP candidate and the sort that wants to dictate his family values to us? Keep those family values, I like being in a faithful relationship, thank you.

  6. Patricia says

    This is totally OT – but since you are here Wowbagger, and may not go back to a days old thread –
    You asked me about a tote goat. I did answer you.
    Here is a YouTube video of a true hillbilly on a tote goat:

    Fun on a Tote Goat

    And then there is the Scooter version of a tote goat:

    Custom 4-wheeler

    I suck at posting YouTube links.

    On the other hand, it may not be off topic – PZ probably had a tote goat too.

  7. BlueIndependent says

    I am really pulling for Franken, and I should probably drop another 10-spot in his coffer. Too bad I don’t live in MN and have no bearing on that election. But then, I’m pulling for pretty much any D over pretty much any R this time around.

    It doesn’t appear that Franken has run the smoothest campaign, and has taken too long to rebut Coleman’s crap in a few cases. But Coleman, like McCain, is 100% negative 100% of the time.

  8. BlueIndependent says

    “What’s not to be proud of?”

    We *are* talking about republicans here, remember? Since when did facts or context mean anything to them, election season or not?

  9. Brendan White says

    I like how they list the playboy column as a bad thing, I think most young voters would go for that.

  10. Jamie G. says

    I hate to advertise here, but this is just too good to not pass on to the Pharyngula crowd. Remember the original Wassup Budweiser commercial? Apparently those guys got back together to do one representing 2008, only this time it ain’t about beer (the McCain crowd ain’t gonna like it much)

  11. says

    Al Franken

    unapologetic ClintonSucker.

    The economic powers that WERE…. could have never gotten GATT, nor NAFTA through with a Republican, so Bush was fired Clinton was appointed.

    The worst thing that ever happened to Unions, Welfare, working people since Herbert Hoover, if you want to know when the New Deal died, and globalization took hold, it was the Clinton Administration.

    Clinton was ten degrees to the right of Richard Nixon, so if you want to feel all warm and fuzzy and get that Clinton feeling again, consider Al Franken against the Repoublican and hold your nose in the voting booth.

  12. John Morales says

    Patricia, this is the fourth time in a row I’ve followed one of your YouTube clips and got “The video you have requested is not available.” Luckily, before posting this I checked the second video you linked to @7, and it did show – so my fears as to what I may have missed are alleviated and any worries I might have had as to your eerie influence are assuaged.

  13. Rey Fox says

    “Al Franken wrote a pornographic column in Playboy- and thought it was funny.”

    I think the odds are good that they never read this column, but labeled it as “pornographic” due to its occupying space in the softest pornography available (unless you count Maxim). Most likely, he wrote about politics. Although I suppose it’s entirely possible that he might have written about sex once or twice. Imagine that. A grown adult human being talking about the act that just about every adult human being engages in. Shocking.

    Seriously, the things they wet their pants about. “Waaahhh, he’s talking about sex!” “Waaaahh, someone’s expressing a non-Christian point of view!” Pansies, the lot of them.

  14. Old Goat says

    I showed this to my oldest son, 17 years old and a deep gamer… and all he said was “lame”.

    I think it’s a riot how they believe all they have to do is make something “hip”, and the kids will eat it up. A LOT of kids can see right through this crap.

  15. Old Goat says

    Whoops… my apologies guys… I commented on the wrong entry.

    S’what I get for typing so early in the AM, pre-coffee.

  16. Kevin Anthoney says

    Wasn’t Franken’s “Rush Limbaugh in Vietnam” story from Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot reprinted in Playboy? I think he mentioned (in Lies?) that Oliver North had read it in there and liked the story.

    He might have written other stuff for them, of course.

  17. sjburnt says

    Come on, there are no Coleman fans here, but the best the Dems could come up with was Al Franken? It is no wonder the race is still fairly close.

  18. says

    Franken hasn’t exactly run a very friendly campaign either. I’m disgusted enough with both of them that I’m considering Barkley.

  19. Blondin says

    Jay Leno: “According to a recent poll, 61 percent of people surveyed said they’d rather see Sarah Palin in a bikini than Pamela Anderson. Although 99 percent said they’d rather see Pamela Anderson as vice president.”

    I know, OT but funny.

  20. Nec_V20 says

    PZ,

    a couple of weeks ago Franken was down by eight points and now he is ahead by three:
    Franken 39.2
    Coleman 36.1
    Barkley 17.0

    The Bachman-Palin underdrive is really rocking the vote for the Dems.

    P.S. in the sixth district it’s looking good:
    Bachman 43.6
    Tinklenberg 42.5

    and of course

    Obama/Biden 51.1
    McKlan/McMILF 42.2

  21. Badjuggler says

    There was an article about Franken in our Star Tribune a few days ago. Apparently he ran for class president when he was in 7th grade with the slogan “Never spit in a man’s face unless his mustache is on fire”. You’ve got to love a guy who was even funny at age 12…

  22. says

    How low can they sink? Well, mathematically speaking, my conjecture is that the sewage-ness of political smearing has an infimum, but no minimum.

    Meaning that yes, there is a lower limit, but no, that’ll never happen and you won’t ever see something that can’t be made a bit worse, a bit closer to that hypothetical lowest point; usually the addition of Ben Stein is enough. (Proof: If you add B.S. to X, you substract something from the value of X. This naturally brings us closer to the infimum, so QED, so STFU.)

    The value of the lower limit of political scumbucketry is left as an exercise to the reader.

  23. says

    Masks of Eris @28: Real-analysis-based political satire FTW.
    Not sure about you’re proof that the infimum can’t be realised:
    Ben Stein union Ben Stein = Ben Stein, so it’s more clear that we can make Stein himself any more despicable.

  24. Bill Dauphin says

    sjburnt (@22):

    …the best the Dems could come up with was Al Franken?

    Are you saying that as the result of looking carefully at Franken, or are you just assuming that a smart-ass former comedian can’t possibly be the best candidate?

    I ask because I keep encountering misconceptions about Franken. I recognize this may not be true of you, but many seem to make two key (but false) assumptions: First, that he’s just another celebrity busybody casually meddling in politics, and second, that he’s a New York carpetbagger who went shopping for a vulnerable Senate seat.

    The facts are that he’s devoted essentially all of his attention to politics for more than a dozen years now (i.e., Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fat Idiot was published in 1996), spending a year as a fellow of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard in 2003 (he was a cum laude Havard graduate in 1973), and going on the air at Air America in early 2004. All this was at some cost to himself, I think: While his political books have been modest bestsellers, it seems likely to me that he could’ve made a great deal more money if he’d stayed in a more tradition entertainment-industry career path. His self-taught political education has been deeper and better than that of many first-time candidates (e.g., Ned Lamont, whom I nevertheless strongly supported).

    As to being a carpetbagger, while Franken was born in New York and is most famous for his time at SNL, he was raised and educated (before heading off to Harvard) in Minnesota, and has deep roots in the state. Moving back to MN to run for the Senate was more a matter of coming home than seat-shopping.

    I listened to almost every minute of Franken’s Air America show, and he strikes me as the polar opposite of the libertine Nooo Yawk smartass his detractors make him out to be. He’s whip-smart, articulate (in a slow-paced, Midwestern sort of way), well-informed, cognitively flexible, and deeply compassionate. I can’t imagine anyone being other than deeply proud to be represented by Franken.

  25. Nerd of Redhead says

    I wish I could send my senate vote to Franken. Where I live, the liberal democratic senator up for reelection looks like a shoo-in. I didn’t even know the name of his opponent until a week ago.

  26. says

    Continuing on the comment (#37) above: And to those who claim that the previous proof has accidentally generated the worst possible thing, we remark that inbreeding between the resulting spawn can used to create successive generations of slimebeasts, each generation a tad worse than the previous one, though of course for each epsilon there is a number N so that after the N:th generation the difference between successive generations is always less than epsilon…

  27. jackd says

    They should add “Al Franken has a history of horndogging college women,” cause it would be equally true and equally irrelevant. Actually it’s just an excuse to tell my Al Franken anecdote.

    Back in 1982, Al and his comedy partner Tom Davis were touring colleges and came to my alma mater. They asked for an audience participant for some schtick or another and chose a comely young lady of my acquaintance. They invited her to join them for drinks after the show and she asked if she could bring her roommate. Sure! The roommate, Dave, told me the expressions on Franken and Davis were priceless, but they all had a pretty good evening of it anyway.

  28. Lurkbot says

    I love the Republican attitude that it’s all right for Gopher and Sonny Bono to be congressmen, and Schwarzenegger to be a governor, and Reagan to be president, but Al Franken is “just a celebrity.”

  29. Crudely Wrottc says

    . . .aimed at kids, with childish illustrations . . .

    Kids. Don’t. Have. Time. For. Such. Shit.

    They are much too busy doing more important things and learning much more important lessons. Whoever was involved in producing such a sorry tract should be touched by the noodly appendage, over and over. Again.

  30. Arnosium Upinarum says

    Crudely Wrottc #41: “Kids. Don’t. Have. Time. For. Such. Shit.”

    It’s. Aimed. At. PARENTS. Who. They. Expect. To. React. Outraged. Because. It. Is. DESIGNED. To. Look. Like. It. Is. Aimed. At. Kids.

    And if that crap finds traction in any parent or voter, it is in fact aimed at kids: childish adults.

    Coleman is a creep and a liar of the first order. (Although with his party it’s hardly much of a distinction to say so). One can only hope that Minnesota is composed of more sense than stupidity and see through his dispicable ‘tick.

  31. John C. Randolph says

    Coleman’s campaign ads pale in comparison to his vote for the $850 billion bailout bill when it comes to the question of how low an elected official can sink.

    -jcr

  32. Robert Byers says

    This Canadian did not know Franken was running. ARRRRRGGGGGGG.
    I CAN NOT STAND THIS PERSON (I’m not just saying that).
    Always he was malicious ,hypicritical, self-righteous in mockery of actual righteousness and just a waste of time to listen too for anything of insight in anything. Just skits and jokes that were funny.
    Then i read the book on Limbaugh. It was a wicked hachjob on a man who had won a great audience by intellectual discussions. I knew this before I read it and read it just to laugh at Franken for what I saw as a silly hopeless attempt to diminish limbaugh.
    When i read the book it was not about rush actually. Rather what he represented.
    An unexpected Yankee (read white protestant/WASP) who by coming out of nowhere threatened a Jewish liberal prominence in shaping public discussions in the regular media establishment largely east coast.
    Al hated Rush because of his identity as a true all-American man sneaking in a dead industry, radio, and revealing the low quality of ethnic/and philosophical monopoly of ideas in public discussion.
    In short the obvious conclusion being shown once again of main street yankee conservatism prevailing over ethnic liberal incompetence.
    Thats what i discovered about Al Franken.
    No surprise he seeks high office with such high ideas.

    Minni save yourselves. Keep entertainers in entertainment until these big messes are over
    How about diversity. Are there not enough Jews in the Senant? Have not enough Jewish senators come from Minni? What % are they there? How about a Nordic or Kenyan?
    Sometimes books covers and titles do reveal much of content, character, and competence.
    Lets PRAY that Al doesn’t have a successful run for office like his jokes/skits but a flop like his movies.
    From Canada

  33. John C. Randolph says

    Robert,

    Rush Limbaugh is indeed a big fat idiot, and the best thing he could possibly do for the conservative movement would be to hop the fence and become a left-wing propagandist.

    -jcr

  34. Nick Gotts says

    jcr,
    Byers’ chief objection to Franken is that he is Jewish. Byers is disgusting anti-semitic filth.

  35. Natalie says

    It was a wicked hachjob on a man who had won a great audience by intellectual discussions.

    That is the most unintentionally hilarious thing I’ve read so far today.

    Byers, thanks for not even trying to hide your obvious hatred of Jewish people. It makes it so much easier for people who haven’t been exposed to your lunacy yet to see that your just another idiotic hatemonger.

  36. noyb says

    Oh, so now liberals are AGAINST comic books with inappropriate content for kids. Nice to know.

  37. Bill Dauphin says

    JOOC… Byers = Poe?

    Robert:

    When i read the book it was not about rush actually. Rather what he represented.

    You mean to say, he developed a theme that was actually larger than his nominal subject? Really?? That BASTARD!!

    ;^)